Your Excellency Csaba Kőrösi, President of the General Assembly,
Ambassador Omar Hilale and Ambassador Gilad Erdan, Co-Facilitators of the High-Level Meeting,
WHO Executive Director Dr Ryan,
Your Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
The global failure to prevent, prepare for, and respond to COVID-19 shows the price of neglect, counted in millions of lives lost, societies upended, and economies devastated. And as the President of the General Assembly said, we cannot let this happen again.
The next 12 months are critical for building sustained political commitment to strengthen pandemic prevention preparedness and response. Missing this opportunity would be catastrophic for the world – because the next pandemic is coming.
This High-level meeting is a unique chance to work at the highest and broadest levels to correct our course. This is a watershed moment. An opportunity to generate real momentum and drive the reforms needed to build a safer world.
Despite the many divisions in our world, there is much we agree on. We agree on the need for greater equity, coherence, leadership, and accountability. There is a remarkable level of alignment in the many proposals for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
The question isn’t just what we need to do, but how we should achieve it; therefore the need for monitoring and for accountability to ensure that we not only uncover the core gaps and challenges, but also identify the most impactful actions that enable leaders and relevant actors to prioritize required efforts and take the evidence based action necessary.
We must agree on how to achieve sustainable equity. We must ensure that life-saving countermeasures are available to those who need them, removing barriers to access and agreeing on a way to finance them. This will require addressing thorny issues of trade and intellectual property.
We must agree on how to work effectively together across sectors and across stakeholders. Leaders and representatives from all sectors and levels of society must build multisectoral preparedness, complementing health-focused reforms at WHO, including negotiations on the Pandemic Accord and IHR amendments.
The purpose of monitoring is to provide regular, timely feedback on implementation of all of this. This enables us to constantly identify areas that require improvement, and make adjustments to ensure that we collectively all meet our intended outcomes.
Monitoring enables us to strengthen stakeholder participation, to maintain relevance of actions, improve efficiency and effectiveness, ensure ownership and sustainability, address ethical considerations, and therefore ensure continuous improvement in our prevention, preparedness and response.
Today, I urge you to focus on the safe and common ground that we must all reach through this meeting.
We need an equitable world in which all countries have the resources to protect their people and communities.
We need a coherent world, where our resources and efforts are coordinated effectively, with all sectors and stakeholders enabled to play their role.
We need an accountable world that has justified trust in its leaders, because they demonstrate accountability for preparedness, and prioritize the wellbeing of their people, and of all people. Together we need to build this world and monitoring and accountability are essential building blocks.
Pandemics connect us. Only by acting together, with and for each other, can we combat the existential threat they pose.
Thank you, Mr President.