*Errors and omissions excepted (E&OE)
Thank you very much, State Minister Yamamoto, and good afternoon to the journalists in Japan and across the Region.
The Regional Committee
As you have heard, we are here in Himeji for the WHO Regional Committee for the Western Pacific. I’d like to thank the Government of Japan and the City of Himeji for hosting this important meeting.
The Regional Committee is our highest governing body, bringing together ministers of health and senior representatives of the 37 countries and areas across Asia and the Pacific that make up the Western Pacific, which is one of the six WHO regions, and home to around 1.9 billion people. It includes the world’s biggest country and the smallest. It has highly developed nations, fast-growing economies, and sparsely-populated island states.
The Regional Committee discusses important health agendas and agrees on actions by WHO and Member States to address them.
At this Regional Committee, we’re trying a new ‘hybrid’ way of bringing together government representatives, WHO experts and partners through a combination of virtual and physical participation.
For those of us physically in Himeji, it marks the first face-to-face meeting in two years. To ensure the safety of participants and the host community, we have used a risk-based approach, working with the Government of Japan, Hyogo Prefecture and Himeji City to ensure the highest standards of infection prevention and control.
COVID-19
A key topic of discussion this week is COVID-19. In the Regional Committee’s opening session this morning, I reported on WHO’s actions to help respond to the pandemic, and our Regional Director of Health Security and Emergencies gave a presentation on the current situation with the virus and vaccine roll-out. I refer you to my speech and Dr Olowokure’s presentation for more details.
RCM71 agenda items
But this Regional Committee will also address four other issues that are important for achieving sustainable development, and for implementing the vision For the Future – to make this Region the safest and healthiest region.
First, Member States will hold a panel discussion on Primary Health Care.
- Primary health care has always been important, but never more so than today – with rapidly ageing populations, and growing burden of noncommunicable diseases, and infectious disease threats like COVID-19.
- We need Primary Health Care systems not only to respond to today’s needs, but to be ready for the future.
Second, they will consider a Regional Framework on nurturing resilient and healthy future generations.
- The threat that noncommunicable diseases pose to health and development in our Region calls for a new approach to school health, by tackling risk factors in childhood and adolescence.
- Using schools as social infrastructure, we can entrench healthy habits in young people – which have a ‘spillover’ effect into communities, and set them up for long and healthy lives.
Third, is a Regional Framework for harnessing the role of traditional and complementary medicine for achieving health and wellbeing.
- Traditional and complementary medicine is widely used in our Region, and, like other services, it has evolved and modernized.
- It offers huge potential for helping to improve health and quality of life as a part of national health systems.
The fourth item Member States will consider is a Regional Framework to end tuberculosis.
- Countries in our Region once had some of the highest burdens of TB.
- We have successfully reduced infections and deaths, but we need to tackle new challenges – such as drug resistance TB and latent TB – and accelerating the progress in order to end Tuberculosis by 2030.
Before I finish, I’d like to zoom back out to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to deal with this virus long-term.
Even with our best efforts, it now seems clear that, globally, the virus will not disappear soon. While we continue to roll out vaccines and implement targeted public health and social measures, we need to expect more surges in cases, make sure health systems are well-prepared to handle them, and minimize the social disruptions they cause.
The Japanese response offers a very good example. Every time there has been a surge in cases, actions were taken to suppress transmission – to avoid going over the ‘red line’, and without heavy lockdowns – and lessons were drawn and applied to the next surge. This kind of continuous learning and refinement is an approach that other countries observed and applied in their own settings. Japan also showed great foresight with the ‘3Cs’ approach – advising populations to limit time spent in closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings. This too has become a standard elsewhere in the Region and beyond.
We are now working with the countries across the Western Pacific to plan for endemic COVID-19, with a focus on protecting the vulnerable and avoiding the ‘red line’ where health services get overwhelmed.
This requires action in five areas: 1) effective use of vaccines; 2) continued application of public health and social measures; 3) expanding health system capacity, including home and intermediate care facilities; 4) early detection and targeted response to ‘flare-ups’; and 5) a risk-based approach to border controls.
We also need to continue improving surveillance, communications, contact tracing and monitoring. And keep investing in universal health coverage as the foundation not only for moving towards COVID-19 becoming endemic, but for ensuring we are prepared for the next pandemic.
With the tools available now, and the preparedness work we have done, I am confident that, working together, we can get out of this together. Thank you very much.