Italian prosecutors have accused a top World Health Organization official of lying to them about a spiked U.N. report into Italy’s coronavirus response
By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press
April 9, 2021, 5:32 PM
• 4 min read
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterEmail this articleROME -- Italian prosecutors have accused a top World Health Organization official of lying to them about a spiked WHO report into Italy’s coronavirus response, revealing private communications Friday that are likely to embarrass the U.N. health agency.
Prosecutors in Bergamo placed Dr. Ranieri Guerra, at the time WHO’s assistant director general, under investigation for allegedly making false declarations to them when he voluntarily agreed to be questioned in November. Guerra was the WHO’s liaison with the Italian government after Italy became the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe last year.
Guerra did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Italy’s SkyTG 24 quoted Guerra as saying he was “shocked and embittered" by the development and was seeking information about it.
Prosecutors are investigating the huge COVID-19 death toll in Bergamo and whether Italy’s lack of preparedness going into the pandemic played a role. Their probe expanded to include the spiked WHO report into Italy's virus response, which revealed that the Italian government hadn’t updated its pandemic preparedness plan since 2006.
WHO pulled the report from its website on May 14, a day after it went up, and never republished it. The document's disappearance suggested that WHO removed it to spare the Italian government criticism, embarrassment and liability.
Guerra was a top official in the Italian health ministry during 2014-2017, when the pandemic preparedness plan should have been updated to comply with EU directives.
When asked at the time whether Guerra or the Italian government had intervened to spike the report, the WHO said it was removed by its regional office in Copenhagen due to “factual inaccuracies.”
But documentation compiled by Bergamo prosecutors, first reported by Italy's state-run RAI Report, indicated that Guerra maneuvered to have the report taken down because the Italian government was upset with it. The documentation included private WhatsApp chats between Guerra and a top Italian public health official, Dr. Silvio Brusaferro.
In one of those chats, dated May 14, 2020, Guerra wrote Brusaferro: “In the end I went to Tedros and got the document removed," a reference to WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO press office, in an email to The Associated Press on Friday, denied that Tedros was involved in spiking the report and insisted the decision-making about the report was done by the Copenhagen office.
“The Director-General was not involved himself in the development, publishing or withdrawal of the report," the email said, repeating that it was removed because it “contained inaccuracies and inconsistencies" and had been published prematurely.
It added that Guerra was no longer an assistant director general but rather a “special adviser."
Prosecutors cited Guerra’s comments to them, which they said were contradicted by the facts, and concluded that “Guerra personally worked on the removal of the report from the WHO site.”
Emails show he tried to have one of the report's main authors, Dr. Francesco Zambon, alter data in the report to say that Italy had “updated" its pandemic plan in 2016, which it had not done. Zambon refused and filed an internal whistleblower complaint alleging that Guerra had tried to pressure him to change the data. Zambon recently resigned.
Guerra has defended his role, saying the report was pulled because of factual inaccuracies and that he did not intervene to have it removed but merely wanted the errors corrected. He has said Italy's 2006 pandemic plan was still valid and didn't need to be updated while he was in charge of prevention at the health ministry.
Guerra apparently disregarded WHO legal advice in November that told WHO officials they were under no obligation to respond to Italian prosecutors' requests for questioning, given their diplomatic immunity as U.N. officials.
Guerra had gone in his personal capacity and was questioned as someone informed about the facts, not as a suspect. But prosecutors ended up placing him under investigation because “he made false declarations."
Prosecutors laid out the allegations against Guerra in an eight-page formal request to the Italian foreign ministry, seeking its assistance in obtaining cooperation from WHO in their investigation.
———
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
