Health workers argue during a demonstration at the Liberian Ministry of Health offices where they gathered for a protest in which they demanded their risk benefits during the first period of the ebola outbreak, in Monrovia, Liberia, July 1, 2015. | Photo by EPA WHO gets failing grade for Ebola response An Independent panel urges big changes to “re-establish … pre-eminence” of the global health body.

The World Health Organization is taking fire for its handling of the Ebola health crisis, with an independent report calling for an overhaul of its finances and organization.

The global health body’s inability to muster financial or political will from member states and its organizational culture must be fixed “urgently” if the group wants to “re-establish its pre-eminence as the guardian of global public health,” the panel appointed by members of the WHO concluded.

In the face of major health scares, few countries have obliged with surveillance or data collection demands, while a quarter have defiantly implemented legal measures and travel bans against the group's recommendations — undermining the health agency’s authority, the report said.

Panel Chair Barbara Stocking, former chief of Oxfam in the UK, said international health regulations must be reformed “in part because there are few incentives for countries to declare emergencies, but also because countries do put trade and travel restrictions which frighten people from declaring.”

Of the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, where more than 11,000 died from the virus, the report was especially critical. The failure of the WHO to immediately declare a global emergency and engage the international community significantly hampered its response, the panel said.

The WHO only declared Ebola a global emergency on August 8, 2014, when the epidemic had already killed over 900 people in West Africa.

The “WHO does not currently possess the capacity or organizational culture to deliver a full emergency public health response,” the report said.

Experts urged major changes to the organization and its main governing framework, the 2005 International Health Regulations, including building a Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response, overseen by an independent board. It also called for an overhaul of the group's contribution policy, suggesting a $100 million contingency fund filled by voluntary contributions.

The agency noted that it has already started up that fund.

Since its outbreak in March 2014, the Ebola virus has infected about 27,550, the vast majority of whom have been in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.

The report is not the first time the WHO, set up after World War II to monitor global health, has been criticized for its handling of the Ebola outbreak.

Last year, a New York Times investigation said the agency and its work with national ministries failed to contain the pandemic in the three West African countries, where nonexistent public health infrastructure demanded a larger role. The WHO acknowledged the criticisms and vowed to correct them.

Incidence rates have dramatically declined, though 20 new cases were reported in the last week of June in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Perhaps most concerning of all, however, has been the reemergence of the deadly virus in Liberia.

Three young men, one already deceased, tested Ebola-positive in Liberia’s Margibi Country last week — nearly 7 weeks after the WHO declared the area Ebola-free — sparking fears of another outbreak.

The organization told POLITICO last week that it was confident in the country’s ability to contain the outbreak, but would send reinforcements on the ground.

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