Your Excellency President Tharman,
Mr Lim Boon Heng,
Ms Ho Ching,
Ms Jennie Chua,
Mr Desmond Kuek,
My friend Bill Gates,
Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends,
Good afternoon, and it’s an honour to be back in the Lion City.
Landing at Changi this afternoon reminded me of the first time I visited Singapore, in 2016, when I was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia.
On that trip I signed an agreement for the Avoidance of Double Taxation – the good old days when countries were looking for ways to remove barriers to trade. Remember those?
Anyway, it’s great to be back.
I thank the Temasek Trust and the Philanthropy Asia Alliance for organizing this important gathering;
And I thank Singapore for its strong support for global health in general, and for WHO in particular.
Singapore and Temasek were among the first to pledge its support to the WHO Investment Round last year. Thank you very much.
I also very much appreciated Singapore’s leadership and support during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on its experience from previous outbreaks, including SARS, H5N1 avian influenza and the H1N1 pandemic.
I distinctly remember former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s video messages during the COVID-19 pandemic, which were an example of strong, calm, evidence-based leadership at a time when it was most needed. I remember the whole world was appreciating Singapore’s experience.
And I remember when President Tharman joined us in Geneva to present the recommendations of the High-Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which he chaired.
Two products of that: the Pandemic Fund was established; and the Joint Finance and Health Task Force was established.
Thank you so much, Your Excellency, for your leadership, which is helping in emergency preparedness and response, and I hope the world is now better prepared for pandemics.
What impressed me most about Singapore’s response to COVID-19 was the alignment between experts, public health officials and political leaders – like I said about the Prime Minister – all delivering the same message. That’s what builds trust in the community, and that’s what we saw in Singapore: high trust.
As a small state at one of the world’s major trading crossroads, Singapore is a perfect example of why a shared response to shared threats is so important.
In our interconnected world, the best way to protect a population from disease threats of all kinds is not isolation, but cooperation; not turning inwards, but outwards.
It’s that principle that is at the heart of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, on which WHO’s Member States reached consensus just a few weeks ago, and which they will consider – and hopefully adopt – at the World Health Assembly in two weeks’ time. History in the making. The early discussions – President Tharman was part, and thank you so much again.
This landmark agreement was negotiated carefully by countries for more than three years, to address the gaps and inequities in global health security exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Pandemic Agreement creates a foundation for international cooperation to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics.
If adopted, it will do many things to make the world safer:
By establishing a new system for sharing pathogens, vaccines and other tools
By facilitating the transfer of technology, knowledge, skills and expertise;
By setting up a coordinating financial mechanism;
By establishing a global supply chain and logistics network;
By mobilizing a skilled, trained and multidisciplinary national and global health emergency workforce;
And much more.
There is one thing the Pandemic Agreement will not do:
It will not infringe on national sovereignty, in any way.
And it will not give WHO power to impose mask or vaccine mandates or lockdowns.
There is a lot of mis- and disinformation about this, as I hope you’re observing, so we must be very clear:
This is an agreement negotiated by countries, for countries, and will be implemented in countries, in accordance with their own national laws.
WHO simply provides the legal framework within which countries have come together to negotiate the agreement.
But we have not been waiting for the Pandemic Agreement to make the world safer.
Based on the lessons learned from COVID-19, we have established several new initiatives, including the Pandemic Fund, the WHO Hub for Epidemic and Pandemic Intelligence, the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme to boost local manufacturing; the BioHub to share samples; the Health Emergency Corps, and more.
In December last year I also had the honour of joining President Emmanuel Macron to open the WHO Academy in Lyon, France.
The WHO Academy will be a game-changer in terms of building capacity in countries by providing lifelong training, online and in-person, for health and care workers, policymakers, and the WHO workforce.
Like the United Nations of which we are part, WHO was born of the realization that the only alternative to global conflict was global cooperation.
Our work includes supporting countries to strengthen their health systems; scanning the world for signals of outbreaks and other emergencies; and bringing countries together to confront the biggest health challenges of our time.
All of this work takes place at a turbulent time, with steep reductions in spending on international development and global health, as President Tharman and Bill were saying earlier.
The sudden withdrawal of funding has caused severe disruption to health services in at least 70 countries that were benefiting from bilateral cooperation with the U.S. and others.
We see disruptions to information systems and supply chains, closures of health facilities, job losses for health workers, and increased out-of-pocket health spending.
WHO is supporting many countries to sustain health services on which millions of people rely.
At the same time, many countries recognize the need to transition away from aid dependency to greater self-reliance, and they see this situation as an opportunity to accelerate that transition. I think this is the right mindset: the mindset of aid dependency has to go away.
WHO therefore has a critical role in supporting countries to navigate that transition.
Even so, it is clear that big gaps remain.
Philanthropies have a key role in helping to bridge these gaps and to support countries on the journey towards sustainable self-reliance.
Many of the philanthropies here are making a huge difference in addressing many health challenges:
With the support of the Gates Foundation and Rotary, we are on the cusp of eradicating polio forever;
The Sasakawa Foundation has helped to reduce the number of reported cases of leprosy globally by more than 95 percent since the 1980s;
The Buffet Foundation is helping to save the lives of countless women who would otherwise die in pregnancy and childbirth;
Others of you have helped to expand access to health services in the Philippines; control dengue in Indonesia and here in Singapore; fight antimicrobial resistance in Cambodia, Malaysia and Viet Nam; accelerate genomics, science and clinical care for people with rare diseases, and more.
I particularly appreciate that many philanthropies are now working together to address challenges jointly, reducing fragmentation.
Let me leave you with three requests.
First, I ask you to work with countries at this most difficult time, not only to address specific health issues, but also to build their capacities on their journey towards self-reliance.
Second, I ask you to work with WHO, to enable us to provide the high quality technical expertise and on-the-ground presence on which so many countries rely.
And third, I ask you to work with each other, to coordinate and maximize your impact and reach.
Thank you all once again for your dedication to health in this region and around the world.
We look forward to your continued leadership and partnership as we work together to realize WHO’s founding vision: the highest attainable standard of health – not as a luxury for some, but a right for all.
I thank you.