Dear colleagues and friends,
Good afternoon, and thank you all for your work over the past two days to define the way forward for PRET.
We greatly appreciate your sharing your experience, expertise and for your continued engagement.
When I was first elected Director-General almost six years ago, people used to ask me what kept me awake at night.
I would answer without hesitating: a global pandemic of a respiratory pathogen.
In 2017, the first major speech I made at Columbia University was on pandemics, especially pandemic influenza, and I used the example of the 1918 pandemic. I also did this at the World Government Summit in UAE in 2018, and in a 2019 major interview with Time, where I was asked the same question and responded the same.
We were all worried and we knew it was coming, and the world was not prepared. And of course we are not yet fully prepared to be honest.
Over the past three years, those fears were realised in the most devastating fashion.
One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the countries that fared best were those that themselves learned the hard lessons of previous outbreaks and epidemics, and made investments to prepare for future crises.
The Mekong region was better prepared and this was a show of their muscle memory from the SARS outbreak.
As the world emerges from COVID-19, we must ensure that we all learn the lessons it is teaching us, and take steps to make the world safer from future epidemics and pandemics.
That’s what PRET is designed to do, by bringing important advances to our work on pandemic preparedness planning, building upon the experiences and work in countries.
At the request of our Member States, PRET is taking an integrated approach to strengthening pandemic planning, by applying common systems, capacities, and knowledge to groups of pathogens, based on their mode of transmission.
This planning approach will take into account the unique challenges from each group of pathogens, such as respiratory pathogens.
This approach allows for more coherent and efficient actions to strengthen capacities and systems.
Preparedness, prevention, and response activities must not be the province of the health sector alone.
Just as health emergencies have impacts across many sectors, so must our preparedness and response efforts span sectors, disciplines and pathogens.
It is critical, too, that community engagement and equity are the centre of our efforts, especially for those populations that are marginalized and most at risk.
Going forward, I would like to highlight four key priorities
First, we seek your commitment to ensure that PRET is a joint, inclusive project, bringing together stakeholders from across sectors, including faith-based organizations, vulnerable populations, and labour organizations.
Second, we seek your commitment to keep pandemic preparedness a top priority. We must not fall into the all too familiar cycle of panic and neglect.
We must remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over; our continued response to this pandemic, and to consolidating the gains we have worked so hard to achieve, is part of our work to prepare for future pandemics.
Third, we seek your commitment to support innovative funding mechanisms like the Pandemic Fund to support preparedness and response efforts and capacity building in low- and middle-income countries. As COVID-19 showed, we are all in this together.
Fourth, Member States are negotiating the Pandemic Accord, which is a generational agreement to prevent the next pandemic. Without such a generational agreement or accord, we will make the same mistakes again.
Tomorrow, WHO will release a global call to action to advance respiratory pathogen pandemic preparedness, which all of you have reviewed this week.
Please share this broadly. PRET provides an opportunity for improve coordination across sectors and across borders, for a more coherent and efficient response.
Let's learn from this pandemic, so that we're prepared and ready for the threats of the future.
I thank you.