Your Excellency Chancellor Merkel,
Commissioner Bachelet,
Former Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon,
Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends,
It is a pleasure to welcome you to this summit, which gets at the core WHO’s mission to use the best available evidence to improve and protect health.
The calibre of speakers we have today highlights just how important an issue this is.
Throughout her time as Chancellor, Dr Merkel has built a powerful legacy for research and evidence-based policy in Germany.
Commissioner Bachelet has championed the human right to science, including the Joint Appeal for Open Science with WHO and others in the COVID-19 response.
And Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been a strong advocate for evidence-based decision-making, including the establishment of the UN Science Advisory Board to provide the UN and Member States with evidence-informed guidance.
Thank you all for joining us today, and for your support for the role of science in public policy.
Science has always been at the heart of improvements in health, and it remains at the heart of everything WHO does.
As part of the WHO transformation, we created a new Science Division in 2019 to improve the way we gather, analyse and distil evidence into guidance for countries, and to support countries to translate evidence into better policies, better practices, and better – and measurable - health outcomes.
Together with our regional offices, the Science Division also coordinates the work of the Evidence-Informed Policy Network, or EVIPNet, which was established 15 years ago to promote the systematic use of evidence in policy-making, and is active in more than 50 countries.
There are many examples of its success.
In Brazil, a national network of evidence centres has helped to bridge the country’s vast distances to support the improvement of municipal primary care, the health of indigenous communities and the COVID-19 response.
In the Republic of Moldova, a local team supported by WHO developed an evidence brief on alcohol control to the Ministry of Health, which led to changes to legislation.
In Uganda, health authorities with support from WHO pioneered an evidence-informed decision-making approach on drug-resistant malaria to update national treatment policy.
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The Science Division has also played a key role in the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the Health Emergencies Programme to produce and quality-assure more than one thousand six hundred guidance documents, in the face of rapidly evolving evidence.
In February 2020, just weeks after the first cases were reported, the Science Division and the Health Emergencies Programme convened a Global Research and Innovation Forum, bringing together more than 500 scientists from 60 countries to identify key research priorities.
That meeting laid the foundation for the development of tools that have helped to prevent, detect and treat COVID-19.
Through the Solidarity Trial, we also ran one of the largest and most diverse clinical trials, to generate robust data on therapeutics.
But the early months of the pandemic exposed uneven levels of research and advice in different countries. This demonstrated the need for countries to have robust systems to translate evidence into policy.
And we have all seen how important it is to counter misinformation with high-quality evidence, presented clearly to decision-makers and the public.
This Summit is therefore an opportunity to take stock of lessons learned during COVID-19, and in particular the need for country-led knowledge translation efforts.
Let me leave you with three priorities:
First, we cannot wait for another crisis to put scientific advisory mechanisms into place. The pandemic has underscored that the time to prepare – and to earn the trust of the public - is before a crisis occurs, not during.
Second, we need cross-sectoral collaboration between the public and private sectors, and civil society, to turn science into action to save lives and protect public health.
Third, we need to build sustainable evidence-to-policy translation mechanisms in all countries, to put global evidence into local context and counter public distrust with evidence-informed, actionable policy recommendations.
Thank you all for your participation in this important summit, and for your commitment to harnessing the power of science to support WHO’s mission to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable.
I thank you.