With the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Associated Press writes that the World Health Organization is still figuring out how to stay ahead of the pandemic.
It writes that the international health agency made a number of key missteps early in the pandemic — such as saying the virus likely wasn't spread through the air and downplaying the need for masks as well as not criticizing countries like China that made errors in handling the pandemic — that have reverberated to the present day.
"This scandal is not just in the past. It's in the present and escalating into the future," the University of Oxford's Trish Greenhalgh tells it.
Currently, the AP adds, the WHO is grappling with equitable distribution of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, but says it is also not clamping down on wealthy nations for not sharing their vaccine doses with developing nations.