Director-General's opening remarks at the Aid-for-Trade Stocktaking Event

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2021. 3. 24. Director-General's opening remarks at the Aid-for-Trade Stocktaking Event

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-aid-for-trade-stocktaking-event 1/4

Director-General's opening remarks at the Aid-for-Trade Stocktaking Event

23 March 2021

My sister Ngozi and my other two sisters Kristalina & Isabelle, And my two brothers David and Angel,

Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

First of all, I would like to congratulate my sister Ngozi on becoming the first woman and the first African to be chosen as Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

And thank you for prioritising this important stocktake to address the ongoing economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on global trade.

More than 122 million cases of COVID-19 have now been reported to WHO, and more than 2.7 million people have lost their lives.

But as you know, the impacts of the pandemic go far beyond the death and disease caused by the virus itself.

Millions of people have lost their livelihood, the global economy is in recession and global trade continues to be disrupted.

And although the global rollout of vaccines is giving us hope of bringing the pandemic under control, we still have a long way to go and many challenges to overcome.

After six weeks of declining cases in January and February, we have now had four straight weeks of increases.

And last week, the number of deaths rose for the first time in seven weeks.

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Cases are increasing in most regions. These are truly worrying trends as we continue to see the impact of variants, opening up of societies, and inequitable vaccine rollout.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have known that vaccines would be a vital tool for controlling it.

But we also knew from experience that market forces alone would not deliver the equitable distribution of vaccines.

That’s why in April last year we established the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which includes the COVAX vaccines pillar, a unique partnership between Gavi, CEPI, Unicef, WHO and others.

In total, COVAX has now delivered more than 32 million doses of vaccine to 57 countries and economies.

We expect to deliver a total of 237 million vaccines between now and May.

Still, the rollout of vaccines has not been as equitable as we would have liked.

Globally, 459 million doses of vaccine have been administered, but 76% of those are in just 10 countries.

The success of COVAX is at risk because of the demands that some high- and upper-middle income countries are putting on the global supply of vaccines.

This is not just a moral outrage, it’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.

The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines. We could all end up back at square one.

And as long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed.

Vaccine equity is not an act of charity; it’s the best and fastest way to control the pandemic globally, and to reboot the global economy. Vaccine equity is in every nation’s interest.

Every day, we are engaged in discussions with manufacturers and leaders of countries at all income levels, exploring ways to ramp up the production and equitable distribution of vaccines.

We see four main ways to do this.

The first and most short-term approach is to connect vaccine manufacturers with other companies who have excess capacity to fill and finish, to speed up production and increase volumes.

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The second is bilateral technology transfer, through voluntary licensing from a company that owns the patents on a vaccine to another company that can produce them, as AstraZeneca has done with SKBio in the Republic of Korea and the Serum Institute of India.

Critically, bilateral tech transfer must include provisions for affordability and equity, which has unfortunately not always been the case with some of the vaccine deals done so far.

The third approach is coordinated technology transfer and licensing, through a global mechanism coordinated by WHO, which we have established through C-TAP.

This provides more transparency, and a more coherent global approach that contributes to regional health security.

And fourth, waiving intellectual property rights, as proposed by South Africa and India, is a mid- to long-term solution that could help countries with vaccine manufacturing capacity to start moving towards producing their own vaccines.

The TRIPS Agreement was designed, as you know, to allow for flexibility on intellectual property rights in the case of emergencies. If now is not the time to use those flexibilities, then when is?

This is an unprecedented situation.

My sisters and brothers,

In some public discourse, the response to the pandemic has been framed as a choice between lives and livelihoods; between health and the economy.

This is a false choice, a false dichotomy. The pandemic is a devastating demonstration that health and the economy are integrated and inter-dependent.

When health is at risk, everything is at risk. But when health is protected and promoted, individuals, families, communities, economies and nations can flourish.

The pandemic will subside, but there will be another one.

And countries will continue to face myriad health challenges that sap productivity, fuel inequality, and hold nations back.

We can only truly respond and recover if we think of health not as a cost, but as an investment in the safer, fairer and more prosperous world we all want.

I thank you.

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