Your Excellency Minister Schulze,
Your Excellency Minister Patel,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
I thank the government of Germany and Your Excellency Minister Schulze for your longstanding commitment to polio eradication, and for co-hosting this pledging event.
On behalf of WHO and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, I welcome all our donors and partners.
In the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo is the mummy of Siptah, who ruled Egypt as a child in the 12th Century BC, until he died aged around 16.
A deformity in his left foot suggests Siptah likely had polio.
This is a disease that has haunted humanity for millennia. And now, we stand on the threshold of eradicating it forever.
Since GPEI was launched in 1988, we have reduced the number of cases reported each year from an estimated 350 thousand to just six last year - a reduction of 99.9%.
That has meant more than 20 million cases of paralysis averted, and the lives of 1.5 million children saved.
However, we have lost ground this year, with 20 cases in Pakistan, two in Afghanistan and six in Mozambique.
Meanwhile, a case of vaccine-derived polio in the United States, and the discovery of poliovirus in sewage in the United Kingdom, show that until polio is eradicated everywhere, it remains a threat anywhere.
We face many challenges, including misinformation, hard-to-access populations, and community fatigue.
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Historic backsliding of immunization programs, which deliver polio vaccine to most of the world's children, has added to the challenges.
The GPEI five-year strategy is designed to overcome these challenges with proven solutions, adaptation and innovative tools.
These include integrating polio activities in routine immunization and other essential health programmes in affected countries.
It includes rolling out type 2 novel oral polio vaccine to help stop variant poliovirus outbreaks more sustainably. This effort is well on the way, with more than 500 million doses already administered.
And it includes continuing the GPEI's commitment to empowering women at all levels of the programme. Gender equality is critical to achieving eradication, because in many of the most affected-communities, only women are allowed access to homes and children other than their own.
But this strategy can only succeed if it is fully funded.
I urge all donors to be part of history, by contributing to the 4.8 billion U.S. dollar target to end polio for good.
As you may know, outside WHO's headquarters in Geneva is a statue commemorating the only human disease in history to be eradicated - smallpox.
I like statues. I want to add to our collection.
We are privileged as a global health community to live at this time, to witness the end of polio.
We can do it. We must do it. So let's do it.
I thank you.
