Your Excellency Prime Minister Modi,
Excellencies,
Three weeks ago, I was in Gujarat state, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, for the G20 Health Ministers’ Meeting.
While there, I visited a local health clinic – an Ayushman Bharat health and wellness centre – where I witnessed a telemedicine consultation between a woman with hypertension and a doctor in a hospital 40 kilometres away.
This clinic is just one small piece of this nation’s giant Ayushman Bharat project – the world’s largest health insurance scheme.
It demonstrates India’s commitment to universal health coverage, which all countries made in the Sustainable Development Goals;
And it demonstrates the potential of digital technologies to fulfil that commitment, which WHO is supporting through the Global Initiative on Digital Health, which we launched under India’s G20 Presidency three weeks ago in Gandhinagar.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, progress against many global health indicators had slowed or stagnated.
The pandemic set things back even further, reversing many of the gains we have made on maternal mortality, childhood immunization and more.
So today I have three requests.
First, we ask you to act now to recover the ground we lost during the pandemic.
Second, we ask you to act now to accelerate towards universal health coverage in all countries, based on strong primary health care.
In particular, we ask you to invest in building the global health and care workforce, and to achieve gender equality at leadership level.
And third, we ask you to act now to address the health risks of the future, including antimicrobial resistance, through a One Health Approach.
COVID-19, as we know, demonstrated that pathogens have no regard for the lines that humans draw on maps, nor for our ideologies, religions or anything else that we use to divide ourselves from each other.
We are indeed one family, one humanity, with one health.
I thank you.