Chief WHO scientist reveals key Covid "blunder"
The agency was too slow to recognize that the virus is airborne, Soumya Swaminathan has said | The outgoing chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) admitted on Wednesday that the body should have warned the public that Covid-19 can be are transmitted through aerosols “much earlier” than it did. Speaking to the Science Insider, Soumya Swaminathan, who announced her resignation from her post last week, said the agency made a "mistake" when it did not more rapidly label the coronavirus as airborne based on the available evidence, adding that “it is something that has cost the organization.” ● She noted that the WHO “did talk about all the methods, including ventilation and masking” that [never] could thwart the spread of the disease. “But at the same time, we were not forcefully saying: ‘This is an airborne virus.’ I regret that we didn’t do this much, much earlier.”