Academies against COVID-19 infection

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) network, whose member the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts is, has urged world academies to cooperation and global solidarity in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of IAP is to boost better and faster use of research and its results for the global public good. As stated in the IAP’s statement, the sufficient readiness for coordinated action and resource allocation is still lacking, contrary to the responsiveness to the previous pandemics. It is time to change this, they say.

IAP consists of 30,000 leading scientists, engineers and health professionals in over 100 countries. This body’s stance is that joint and coordinated effort on the global scale is vital to check the spread of coronavirus. The following priorities are also mentioned: firstly, countries should cooperate and ensure governments and leaders in public health work together to fight the pandemic, focusing on global scale planning; secondly, governments must make use of the best scientific evidence to strengthen the preparedness of the public health and assuaging socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19 induced crisis and third, IAP recommends fast and coordinated activities to support countries with weak health care systems, particularly in Africa, which still has not reported major coronavirus infection.

One of the leading scholars of this network, Krishan Lal pointed out that ‘The credibility of academies comes not only from their scientific excellence, but also from the fact that they are free of vested interests. In the last weeks, fake news and misinformation have spread, so it is of utmost importance for policy-makers to listen to distinguished people, which already have experience on complex issues requiring in-depth analysis on the scientific basis’.

The complete statement is available here https://tinyurl.com/IAP-COVID-19.