Honourable Minister Nísia Trindade,
Honourable Ministers, dear colleagues and friends,
I thank Brazil for bringing us together for the first time under its G20 Presidency.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the G20 has played a vital role in shaping the global health security architecture, including establishing the Pandemic Fund under the Presidencies of Italy and Indonesia, and the Joint Finance-Health Task Force.
I thank G20 countries for your leadership on these critical initiatives, which are already making a difference.
Your leadership is now needed more than ever, with the deadline approaching for the pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations.
The World Health Assembly is now less than 10 weeks away.
Countries have made good progress, and there is broad agreement on most aspects of both instruments.
But as you know, there remain critical areas where the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body has not yet reached consensus.
Since November last year, four subgroups of the INB have been working to find solutions on four key issues:
Pandemic prevention and One Health;
Sustainable production, technology transfer and supply chains;
Access and benefit sharing;
And implementation support and financing.
The subgroups have each submitted their reports to the INB bureau, which has integrated their recommendations into the revised text of the agreement, which was circulated to Member States last week.
Starting on Monday next week, the INB will meet for the final time, and I sincerely hope that Member States will begin to converge on these key issues.
It’s mission-critical for humanity that they do.
Time is of the essence. If we miss the opportunity to put in place a pandemic agreement and a stronger IHR, we risk losing momentum.
More importantly, we risk leaving the world exposed to the same shortcomings that hampered the global response to COVID-19: a lack of coordination, a lack of sharing information, and a lack of equity.
Some people have suggested the two-year timeline that Member States set themselves was too ambitious.
We must remember that the WHO Constitution was negotiated in six months, and the UN Charter took just two months – in an era before Zoom calls and email, when the world was less connected and communication was much slower.
There is no reason negotiations on the pandemic agreement and the IHR cannot be finalised in the next 10 weeks.
It will require courage and compromise. Everyone will have to give something, or no one will get anything.
Most of all, it will take leadership – your leadership.
The leadership of G20 countries in the next nine weeks, and especially in the next two weeks, is vital.
We cannot – we must not – miss this generational opportunity.
There is no us and them; there is only us, as one humanity, working together to find a shared response to the shared threat of pandemics.
My thanks again to Brazil for its leadership on this issue, and we look forward to working with all G20 countries in the year ahead.
Obrigado. I thank you.