Mr Darren Tang,
My sister Ngozi,
Keynote speaker Professor Salim,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Good morning, it's a pleasure to be with you, and thank you to Darren and our friends at WIPO for hosting us today.
This meeting is a good opportunity to assess lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and to discuss challenges in public health, innovation and intellectual property.
We have come a long way in bringing the pandemic under control, and we are in a much better position. But the pandemic is still not over. Ten thousand people are dying from this virus every week.
Despite all the gains we have made in the past three years, severe global inequities still hamper the response.
Only one in five people in low-income countries has been vaccinated;
Access to diagnostics and life-saving treatments for COVID-19 remains unacceptably unaffordable and unequal, although access to vaccines has improved significantly;
The burden of post-COVID-19 condition is only likely to increase;
And large gaps in surveillance remain, particularly in low and lower-middle income countries. This is a weakness not only for detecting new variants of COVID-19, but also for monitoring the spread of other diseases.
We hope that WTO Member States will soon reach an agreement on the extension of the TRIPS waiver for diagnostics and therapeutics.
Local production of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics is key to bringing this pandemic to an end, and for strengthening preparedness for future emergencies.
Last year, WHO launched a technology transfer hub in South Africa, to give low- and lower-middle income countries the know how to rapidly-produce mRNA vaccines.
The Hub now has 15 country recipients around the world.
However, it has still not received licences from key manufacturers.
So far, the licenses granted exclude many countries, which cannot benefit from more affordable generic versions of therapeutics recommended by WHO.
We call on the companies to expand the geographical scope of these voluntary licenses and to allow competition and price reductions to allow these important treatments to be used where they are needed the most.
This gets to the very purpose of this Trilateral collaboration, which is to promote a coherent and science-based balance between the interests of technology holders and timely, affordable access for patients.
The mandates and constituencies of our three organizations are different, but we are united in our aim of achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
This pandemic has been a visceral demonstration of how health directly impacts societies and economies.
Simply put, we cannot afford not to work together.
The interfaces between public health, intellectual property and trade have been at the centre of international negotiations and policy debates in our three organizations for more than two decades.
The SDGs call for cooperation to support development targets and emphasize the importance of R&D and access to medicines in accordance with the Doha Declaration.
All these elements are key parts of the current negotiations on the pandemic accord. We encourage all Member States and other stakeholders to actively engage in these discussions.
Let me leave you with three priorities:
First, I urge Member States to implement all the available tools they have to make local production possible and improve access.
This includes licenses for access, the use of TRIPS flexibilities, and the implementation of the recent WTO TRIPS decision. WHO will continue providing technical assistance on how to make use of these instruments.
Let's not forget that these innovations, like so many others in the health field, were the result of public investment.
Governments spending public money on research and development have the right to add conditions to ensure timely, equitable global access for the medicines, diagnostics, vaccines or other health related technologies developed from these investments.
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Second, I encourage engagement with the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, a voluntary mechanism to rapidly share technologies, intellectual property, and clinical data.
This important mechanism, which we developed with the government of Costa Rica, has enormous potential for improving inequities, but so far has been sadly underutilized.
Third, WHO is committed to continue working in the framework of the Trilateral Collaboration to work on a coherent approach to access to critical health products, innovation, trade and intellectual property.
My brother Darren and sister Ngozi, thank you once again to you and your colleagues for your hard work, commitment, leadership and partnership.
We look forward to working with you to harness the power of innovation and intellectual property for the health of all the world's people.
Finally I wish us a peaceful and healthy 2023.
I thank you.
