Madam President, Mrs Lee, honourable ministers, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,
First, let me thank Dr Mahler for his presence on this occasion.
Dr Lee passed away exactly a year ago, just hours before the start of the Health Assembly.
I was with him two days earlier when he collapsed. This was the first signal of the shock to come.
I have referred often to Dr Lee as my predecessor and mentor. He left a personal stamp on much of the work we have been discussing this week.
He also influenced my understanding of the values that should guide public health. As you know, Dr Lee started his career in the Western Pacific Region working with leprosy patients in countries.
This face-to-face confrontation with human suffering shaped his priorities as a public health professional.
It also fixed his determination to address unmet needs, especially in vulnerable populations. He then moved on to become the regional adviser and later the director for communicable diseases in the Western Pacific Region.
He came to Geneva to direct the highly successful Expanded Programme on Immunization. He used that flagship programme to strengthen the attack on polio.
We know that his commitment to polio eradication never wavered.
He also served as Executive Secretary of the Children’s Vaccine Initiative, the forerunner of the GAVI Alliance.
We all know the large number of childhood lives that are being saved by this initiative.
It is doing much to share the benefits of new technologies among all the world’s children, regardless of the income levels of their parents.
He moved on to serve as a special adviser to Dr Brundtland in the area of information technology.
In this responsibility, he quite literally made it possible for all levels of the Organization to speak with each other.
I have personally seen the vital role of this connectivity when outbreaks or natural disasters occur.
His next challenge was to strengthen the international response to tuberculosis at a time when this disease had been declared a global emergency.
He helped make the Stop TB Partnership one of the strongest and most effective partnerships within WHO.
Under his leadership, the TB programme became a model in terms of strategies and target setting, burden of disease assessment, monitoring, reporting, and meticulous budgeting.
That created a momentum and a level of confidence that continue today.
He knew how to confront a growing menace to health with a well-crafted strategy, and get all partners working together in a focused and coordinated manner.
In his position as Director-General, we all remember his passionate commitment to the 3 by 5 initiative.
He could not stand two things: suffering and injustice.
He plunged into this project in a way that made others follow.
He was rewarded, not with achievement of the 3 by 5 goal. He was rewarded with commitment to the even more ambitious goal of universal coverage.
This is an even higher level of justice. It is an appropriate tribute to his courage.
I worked most closely with him after he appointed me to serve as his representative for avian and pandemic influenza.
He made himself an expert on this H5N1 virus. He used every opportunity to alert the world to the need to increase preparedness.
He personally called for all the major conferences that allowed the world’s best experts to reach consensus on key issues. These ranged from collaboration with the agricultural sector, to strategies for vaccine development, to a protocol for rapid containment near the start of a pandemic. We travelled together frequently, and it was on these occasions, in particular, that I got to know him personally and appreciate his sense of humour.
He told me once how he knew that, as Director-General, he would be expected to speak with Presidents and Prime Ministers. He just never expected he would talk to them so much about chickens.
Today, as we spend this time to remember his contributions to public health, there is much to recall that is indeed worth the attention of Presidents and Prime Ministers.