A year-and-a-half into the coronavirus pandemic, the world has still done far too little to respond and has failed to learn from its mistakes, a global health monitor has said.

In a report launched in Berlin, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), an independent body set up by the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, slammed the continued failings in the global response to the pandemic.

“If the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic was defined by a collective failure to take preparedness seriously and act rapidly on the basis of science, the second has been marked by profound inequalities and a failure of leaders to understand our interconnectedness and act accordingly,” the report said.

The pandemic has exposed a world that is “unequal, divided, and unaccountable”, it concluded.