*Errors and omissions excepted (E&OE)
Acknowledgments:
Chairperson, the Honourable Secretary Duque
Honourable ministers
Representatives from Member States and partner agencies
Ladies and gentlemen
Good morning! And welcome again to the 71st session of the Regional Committee for the Western Pacific.
I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to new Ministers joining us for the first time.
Congratulations to our Chair, Honourable Secretary Duque from the Philippines. Secretary, thank you very much for taking on this important role in this difficult time. We allknow there are many other demands on your time.
Honourable Ministers and distinguished delegates: last year, we gathered in Manila and talked about how, together, we would work towards addressing the challenges facing our Region in the future.
None of us could have imagined how quickly the future would arrive. COVID-19 is the most challenging public health event we have seen in 100 years – and it is testing not only the capacity of our health systems, but also the resilience of our societies and economies.
The Report before you reflects our dramatically changed world. It highlights how WHO has been working to respond to COVID-19 in our Region, while at the same time driving forward our vision to make the Western Pacific the healthiest and safest region.
Before I turn to that, I would like to appreciate the minute of silence led by the outgoing Vice-Chair earlier. When I reflect on the last 9 months, I think – with great sadness – of the many families who have lost loved ones to the virus.
This year has also seen the loss of some giants of the Western Pacific Region’s public health community, with the recent passing of former Cook Islands Prime Minister Joe Williams, as well as former Cooks Health Minister Nandi Glassie. Earlier this year, former WHO Regional Director, Dr S.T. Han, also passed away. I pay my respects to all of them and send my condolences to their families.
Honourable Ministers and distinguished delegates, as soon as For the Future was endorsed last year, we started work on operationalising it in our programme budget, so that we could start implementation on January first this year.
Then our plans changed – along with those of the rest of the world – when, in late December, we were first alerted to a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan.
Our Region has been investing in preparedness for health emergencies for more than a decade, guided by the Asia Pacific Strategy for Emerging Diseases and Public Health Emergencies, or APSED – now in its third iteration. APSED III has been built on lessons from SARS, the H1N1 influenza pandemic and other real-life events. The importance of continuing to invest in preparedness is also a central theme of For the Future.
In January of this year, the response systems we have spent years building were fully activated, beginning with the cycle of risk assessment.
At WHO, we realized we would need to deliver our commitments differently than planned. So we began repurposing staff, and triggered our Business Continuity Plan – to ensure that we could remain fully operational even as much of the world went into lockdown.
We developed a reprioritized workplan, identifying work on essential services – such as measles, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal and child health – which had to continue; as well as work in areas such as health systems – critical for the COVID-19 response – which had to be fast-tracked.
The pandemic certainly changed our plans for 2020. But rather than delaying the implementation of our vision, the pandemic response has reinforced its importance: COVID19 has amplified the challenges facing the Region’s health systems, and pushed us to think even harder about how to address these challenges for the future.
Honourable Ministers and distinguished delegates, before I describe our COVID-19 response in more detail, I would now like to hand over to the newly appointed Director of Health Security and Emergencies, Dr Babatunde Olowokure, to provide a COVID-19 briefing.
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Thank you very much, Babatunde.
Honourable delegates, COVID-19 has created unprecedented challenges for our Region and the world. I would like now to very briefly describe the actions we have taken to respond, in line with the International Health Regulations and tailored to each country’s needs.
Since day one, we have facilitated information-sharing, including through regular videoconferences with countries and partners, which have helped countries improve their response and preparation. For example, early on we learnt from China that we can actively suppress transmission, and from the Republic of Korea about the importance of quickly scaling up testing capacity as part of the public health response.
We have been constantly assessing data and using it to develop guidance for countries – for instance, on preparing for large-scale community transmission, and infection prevention and control.
With partners, we have provided supplies and equipment from the WHO stockpile: almost 7 million masks, more than 1 million respirators, and 370,000 diagnostic tests have now been delivered across the Region.
We have been coordinating research and development – including facilitating participation from our Region in the WHO Solidarity Trial for therapeutics.
Partnerships have never been more important – especially at country level. For instance, in the Pacific, staff from WHO, DFAT, MFAT, UN agencies and other partners worked side-by-side as part of the Joint Incident Management Team. We’ve also strengthened our relationships with WHO Collaborating Centres working on various aspects of the response.
And, we’ve been working with countries to scale up their capacity to fight misinformation. In a pandemic, rumours can be just as dangerous as the virus itself. Communications has been a crucial tool in our response.
Consistent with the APSED principle of ‘learn and improve’, we organized a special session of the APSED Technical Advisory Group – or TAG – to take stock of the response, which confirmed that our actions were in line with APSED implementation.
Have we done everything perfectly? I’m sure we have not, and I personally look forward to the outcomes of the various independent international reviews of the pandemic response currently underway, to see how we can improve further.
Honourable representatives, there is one very important aspect of our COVID-19 response I haven’t yet touched on, and which I would like to discuss now: the provision of tailored support to countries.
From the beginning, country support has been our highest priority. This is in keeping with For the Future’s emphasis on the need for responsiveness to each country’s unique context – and it has been especially important in the COVID context.
As we have seen, this virus has no regard for international borders. If any one country is vulnerable, every country – and our Region – remains at risk.
We have provided tailored support on a wide range of issues, based on our knowledge of country contexts – from training on specimen collection, biosafety and laboratory diagnosis, to establishing multi-source surveillance systems, strengthening infection prevention and control in hospitals, and of course, scaling up contact tracing.
Unfortunately, we don’t have time to go into detail about all of this work, but I’d like to share a few examples now – in lieu of our traditional RCM ‘work in countries’ session, where at past RCMs we have discussed the attributes of good country support.
First, let’s go to Mongolia, which took early and decisive action to stop the virus, made possible by years of APSED implementation. While they were keeping the virus out, the Ministry of Health, with WHO’s support, conducted a simulation exercise to prepare for large scale community transmission. Let’s take a look.
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Thank you very much, Honourable Munkhsaikhan and colleagues from Mongolia.
Strategic communications was one of the operational shifts in the For the Future vision, and across the Region, has been a critical tool in the COVID-19 response. Let’s look at one example – from Lao PDR, where WHO and the Ministry of Health have been working together on risk communications. Let’s play the video please.
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Thank you very much, Minister Bounkong and WR Laos. Third, we go to the Federated States of Micronesia, where WHO has been working with the government on border control, as well as community engagement using a “grounds up” approach – another of the operational shifts included in the For the Future vision. Let’s play the video please.
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Thank you very much, Secretary Taulung and colleagues from FSM.
The For the Future paper emphasises the importance of WHO responding to every country’s unique contexts and needs. I hope these examples demonstrate how we have sought to do that as part of the COVID response.
Honourable Ministers and distinguished delegates, while the pandemic disrupted many of our plans for this year, in many ways COVID-19 has made our For the Future vision more relevant than ever.
We agreed last year that we should work today to address the challenges of tomorrow, including the threat of a major pandemic. With COVID-19, the future is well and truly here.
The human and economic costs of the pandemic have been devastating. As a result, there has never been more attention on health, and the links between health and economic security. This has created a unique moment – not only because of the pandemic, but because the pandemic has created the conditions in which we have the opportunity to change our future.
COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses in our health systems – making the task of reforming these systems to be fit for the future ever more urgent. The pandemic has also placed new demands on all of us as individuals, to take actions – such as mask wearing and hand washing – to protect both ourselves and others.
The preamble to the WHO constitution says that the health of all peoples is “dependent on the fullest co-operation of individuals and States”. This has never been more true. In the COVID world, individuals, communities, the private sector, and governments all have roles and responsibilities in securing and maintaining good health.
Every day we report on the number of people who have died from COVID-19. And every one of those numbers is a life lost – and a family which will never be the same. I strongly believe we have an obligation to these families not only to protect against disease threats today, but to build a better future.
We did not choose this moment, but we must seize it – by doing the hard work of creating a ‘new normal’, where communities which are resilient against infectious diseases provide the foundation for healthier and more sustainable societies and economies overall.
Excellencies, distinguished delegates: 2020 has been a very difficult year. I began this speech by talking about my feelings of sadness for those who have lost their lives.
But when I reflect on this year, I also think – with great gratitude and humility – of the millions of health professionals and other essential workers around our Region and the world who have continued going to work every day to look after the sick, and to keep the rest of us safe.
I also feel pride in WHO and Ministry of Health staff in countries, who, with care and compassion, have been working so hard on the response – often at considerable personal cost.
I ask you to join with me in a moment of applause as a sign of our thanks.
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I am also proud of the spirit of solidarity that has characterized interactions between countries of our Region over the last nine months – from technical exchanges on issues such as laboratory testing and clinical management, to working together in joint incident management teams, to governments’ commitments to support countries across the Region to access a vaccine should one become available.
In these difficult times, countries have come together in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration – borne out of a recognition that no country in our Region is safe until every country is safe. We really are all in this together.
As we navigate our way through the COVID era and beyond to advance our vision for the future, these are the values that I hope will continue to guide us: humility, compassion, support for the vulnerable, and solidarity.
I sincerely thank Member States for your trust in me to continue to lead WHO’s work in the Western Pacific, as we continue our journey – despite the difficult circumstances we face– to become the healthiest and safest region in the world.
Thank you very much.