Your Excellency Minister Suzuki,
Your Excellency Minister Kato,
Excellencies,Ohayō.
I thank the government of Japan for bringing G7 finance and health Ministers together around our shared goal of global health security.
I am glad to be here with my friend David, after working so closely together on the pandemic these last three years.
This past week, I have been able to declare an end to two international public health emergencies: COVID-19 and mpox.
But it is not time to let down our guard.These threats are still with us, and the next pandemic could be far more damaging, to our health, our societies and our economies. As climate change, deforestation, urbanization, food insecurity and other risks escalate, so does the threat of epidemics and pandemics.
In the global COVID-19 crisis, health and finance found common purpose.
30 billion US dollars in new financing was contributed to the international, WHO-led, multi-agency response.
While the international financing for COVID-19 was extraordinary, it was ad hoc, it came late in the pandemic, and it did not generate the return on investment it could have, in both health and economic terms.
Millions of lives could have been spared had we been able to finance these measures more quickly.
The Pandemic Fund was established to address critical gaps in pandemic preparedness, especially in lower income countries.
But we still do not have all of the financing tools we need to tackle the next pandemic.
Let me outline three key ways you can solve this problem.
First, we urge you to capitalize the Pandemic Fund, to ensure this new mechanism can properly fulfil its role of providing catalytic, gap-filling finance for countries to strengthen their defences.
Second, we urge you to complement the Pandemic Fund with an assured approach to large-scale, multi-billion dollar pandemic surge financing when new pandemic pathogens break through.
Surge financing – from day ‘zero’ – is crucial if we are to fully exploit the narrow window of opportunity in the first months of a pandemic to change its course.
Such financing is essential to coordinate the international response, deploy emergency teams and stockpiles, and accelerate the development and allocation of new vaccines, tests and treatments.
Surge financing is also essential to mount all aspects of the domestic response in low-income countries, including to maintain essential health services and socio-economic measures.
And third, we urge you to institutionalize cooperation between finance and health, nationally and internationally.This requires further strengthening and sustaining our new ways of collaborating across finance and health, in every country, in the G7 and in the G20 Joint Finance-Health Task Force.
WHO, as host of the Secretariat for the G20 Finance-Health Task Force Secretariat, under India’s Presidency and the Task Force Co-chairs Indonesia and Italy, is already working with the World Bank on pandemic surge financing.We welcome the support of the G7 to accelerate and align our work with the World Bank to jointly map existing and potentially untapped surge financing mechanisms.
My thanks again to Japan for bringing us together. The G7 has a crucial role in making real changes today to keep the world safer tomorrow.
Arigatō gozaimasu.
I thank you.