I never trust any second-hand report of anything WHO are supposed to have said or done these days, such is the amount of spin, distortion and misrepresentation from the media.
The article in the OP is one of the worst examples of this I have seen so far. Here's the original interview:
It's worth watching in full - the main interview starts at about 15 minutes and Nabarro also makes a few comments and answers some questions during the rest of the show.
WHO’s huge lockdown backflip - when it's nothing of the sort, it's the same consistent message they've been pushing from the start - lockdown measures are a last resort to be used when you've fucked it up and lost control of the virus. All they do is buy you a bit of time to build up your public health response and they come at enormous cost both to individuals and economies.
calling for world leaders to stop locking down their countries and economies. - even the quote they use in the next paragraph shows this is not what he said: Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO appealed to world leaders yesterday, telling them to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method ” of the coronavirus. (my bold)
He also claimed that the only thing lockdowns achieved was poverty
This is a flat out lie. He said, 'Lockdowns only serve one purpose and that is to give you a bit of breathing space, so you stop everything, the virus stops moving and while you've got that breathing space you should be really building up your testing, building up your contact tracing, building up your local organisation, so that as you release lockdown you're bound to get more cases but you can deal with it really, really elegantly.'
The article even quotes him further down the page: “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
The article discusses hard lockdowns such as those in Melbourne, Spain and China and makes the astonishing assertion that The WHO thinks these steps were largely unnecessary. I cannot understand where they got that from, it's not WHO's stance at all, never has been and Nabarro says nothing like that in this interview. The overall message is that lockdowns are for when you've lost control of the virus and we need to put the right things in place so that doesn't happen. If we do that then lockdowns won't be necessary.
The reason for all this spin becomes clear at the end of the article when they discuss the Great Barrington Declaration:
When asked about the petition, Dr Nabarro had only good things to say. “Really important point by Professor Gupta,” he said.
Nabarro had been asked to comment on a quote by Professor Gupta about the worldwide economic harm that lockdowns cause. He's right, it is a really important point - lockdowns are incredibly damaging. Nobody's arguing with that. He wasn't asked whether he thought we should be aiming for 'herd immunity', he wasn't asked what he thought about this idea of 'focused protection'.
Of course he 'had only good things to say' about Gupta et al - he's from WHO, this is how they do things. He very neatly avoided commenting on the GBD as a whole. WHO have only good things to say about Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping ... the whole thing relies on diplomacy, that's their only weapon. They go to enormous lengths to avoid publicly criticising any country, leader or scientist. The nearest you'll get to public criticism is things like back in March, when WHO were asked to say which countries needed to take the virus more seriously and Mike Ryan said 'You know who you are.'
Not being publicly slagged off by WHO really is not some sort of ringing endorsement!
Everything Nabarro said during the interview, aside from agreeing that lockdowns are very harmful, was the exact opposite of the GBD approach but you wouldn't know that if you just read the article. It's disgraceful shitty journalism.