11/10/2021
By Dedra Daigle
"The Precautionary Principle During Public Health Emergencies: Learning from WHO’s Pandemic Response" with David Kriebel, ScD, Professor Emeritus and Director, Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, UMass Lowell.
In January 2021, The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at UML was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to conduct research and write a report on how the Precautionary Principle (PP) might be used to improve WHO’s response to future health emergencies. Since the late 1990s, the Lowell Center has been recognized internationally as a leader in promoting precaution in environmental health policy. This talk will include a brief history of the PP, some of the criticisms of WHO’s delayed response in the early months of the pandemic, and ways in which the PP might improve its performance in future public health emergencies. Two review committees appointed by the Director General of the WHO to evaluate the pandemic response independently concluded that delays in taking preventive actions in the early weeks of 2020 could have been avoided had the PP been invoked. This report proposes concrete steps that WHO and other health authorities could take to be more agile in future emergencies through invoking the PP.
Join via Zoom link
Scheduled event 2 to 3 p.m.