Thank you for the invitation to address you today. It is a pleasure to be among friends who share strong commitment to preparedness, and to the success of the High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.
We are here today because the world has repeatedly failed to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics. COVID-19 has shown the devastating cost of failure.
They say that if you do the same thing again and again, and expect different results, there must be something wrong. This High-Level Meeting is a chance to work together differently, building the foundations for a robust global health architecture that is coherent, equitable, and accountable.
Different means ensuring that there is equitable access to resources needed during pandemics. The world then, must address challenging trade and intellectual property issues and find a way of financing preparedness, without which all our commitments will be hot air.
Different means advancing multisectoral preparedness and strengthening the One Health approach to PPPR engaging all sectors, including the private sector and civil society, to build country capacities, and I want to emphasize this again, to find the funding needed to power reforms.
Different also means using the High-Level Meeting to address growing fragmentation and minimize redundancies. At Monday’s Strategic Roundtable on Member State-led processes to strengthen PPPR, INB Co-Chair, Roland Driece, highlighted the need to work out ‘what goes where’ between the IHR Amendments and the Pandemic Accord.
“What goes where” should also be a key consideration for the HLM. Priorities for the Declaration should be chosen to bring sustained political commitment, and to enhance and align reforms. There is a clear need for the meeting to endorse the central role of WHO in preparedness and to build momentum for the negotiations of the Pandemic Accord.
We also need to design these critical reforms based upon evidence. The world cannot wait for a future pandemic to see whether the new global health emergency architecture is fit for purpose. For this reason, the GPMB has called for a simulation exercise of the pandemic accord and the IHR amendments – before they are finalized - to provide assurance of their effectiveness, help identify any remaining gaps, and resolve any outstanding areas of disagreement.
The GPMB continues to emphasize the vital role of independent monitoring to guide reforms. Monitoring is essential to provide timely feedback on progress, and to identify areas for course correction. The High-Level Meeting must recognize the critical importance of independent monitoring as a tool to strengthen accountability and to make sure the COVID-19 chaos and tragedies are not repeated.
In fulfilment of its mandate for independent monitoring, the GPMB has developed a Monitoring Framework to provide a risk-based, multisectoral, whole-of-government, whole-of-society assessment of global health emergency prevention, preparedness, and resilience, helping to define the scope of what is needed.
We invite you to go through this Framework. It is a living document. The GPMB hopes that this Monitoring Framework can support states and stakeholders in their assessment for preparedness, and therefore the needs for reform
Finally, leaders must approach this High-Level Meeting on Pandemic, Prevention, Preparedness and Response as the beginning of a commitment, not as an end in itself. Regardless of its manifestation, for any high-level governance structure of PPPR to succeed, it needs to be coherently integrated into the global health ecosystem and sustained by clear mechanisms for accountability. We want them to meet again and again – not just once. GPMB has called for a further High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention Preparedness and Response within the next two years, to follow the conclusion of INB negotiations, setting successive steps towards a safer world.