WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the 150th session of the Executive Board

• Our commitment in the coming year – and in the coming five years – is to dramatically strengthen our ability to deliver results in countries.
• First, to support countries to make an urgent paradigm shift towards promoting health and well-being and preventing disease by addressing its root causes. The pandemic has demonstrated that we must elevate protecting and promoting health as top priority, with significantly increased investment in countries, and at WHO.
• The second priority is to support a radical reorientation of health systems towards primary health care, as the foundation of universal health coverage. That means restoring, expanding and sustaining access to essential health services, especially for health promotion and disease prevention, and reducing out-of-pocket spending
• The third priority is to urgently strengthen the systems and tools for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response at all levels, underpinned by strong governance and financing to ignite and sustain those efforts, connected and coordinated globally by WHO.
• The fourth priority is to harness the power of science, research innovation, data and digital technologies as critical enablers of the other priorities – for health promotion and disease prevention, for early diagnosis and case management, and for the prevention, early detection, and rapid response to epidemics and pandemics.
• The fifth priority is to urgently strengthen WHO as the leading and directing authority on global health, at the centre of the global health architecture.

Your Excellency Dr Patrick Amoth, the Chair of the Executive Board,

Excellencies, Regional Directors, dear colleagues and friends,

Good morning to all EB members who have joined us here in Geneva, and good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all Member States, participants and observers online.

Happy New Year to you all.

I welcome the new members of the Board: Colombia, Guinea Bissau, India, Madagascar, Malaysia, Peru, India, Tonga and Tunisia.

As the Chair said, we send our deepest condolences and concern, our warmest greetings and our best wishes to our sisters and brothers in Tonga, who are facing difficult days as they respond to last week’s volcanic eruption and tsunami.

As we speak, WHO is working with our partners to support the response, providing medical expertise and supplies.

A national Emergency Medical Team, trained by WHO, was deployed almost immediately following the eruption, and we are supporting them with medical items, first aid kits, tents, portable toilets, and water filtration equipment.

Our country liaison officer, Dr Yutaro Setoya, is playing a crucial role in channelling communication between UN agencies, humanitarian partners and the government, including through the use of WHO’s satellite phone, which was one of the few ways to get information in and out of the country in the first few days after the eruption. So, my appreciation to our country office and also to our Regional Director, Dr Takeshi Kasai, who is with us today.

This Sunday marks two years since I declared a public health emergency of international concern – the highest level of alarm under international law – over the spread of COVID-19.

At the time, there were fewer than 100 cases and no deaths reported outside China.Two years later, almost 350 million cases have been reported, and more than 5.5 million deaths and we know these numbers are an underestimate.

On average last week, 100 cases were reported every three seconds, and somebody lost their life to COVID-19 every 12 seconds. Since Omicron was first identified just nine weeks ago, more than 80 million cases have been reported to WHO – more than were reported in the whole of 2020.

So far, the explosion in cases has not been matched by a surge in deaths, although deaths are increasing in all regions, especially in Africa, the region with the least access to vaccines. So where do we stand? Where are we headed? And when will it end?

These are the questions many are asking.

It’s true that we will be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that we will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases, which will provide a platform for preparedness for future pandemics.

But learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride. It cannot mean that we accept almost 50 thousand deaths a week, from a preventable and treatable disease. It cannot mean that we accept an unacceptable burden on our health systems, when every day, exhausted health workers go once again to the front line.

It cannot mean that we ignore the consequences of long COVID, which we don’t yet fully understand. It cannot mean that we gamble on a virus whose evolution we cannot control, nor predict.

There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out, and how the acute phase could end – but it is dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant, or that we are in the endgame.

On the contrary, globally the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge. To change the course of the pandemic, we must change the conditions that are driving it. We recognize that everyone is tired of this pandemic; That people are tired of restrictions on their movement, travel and other freedoms; That economies and businesses are hurting; And that many governments are walking a tightrope, attempting to balance what is effective with what is acceptable to their people.

Each country is in a unique situation, and must chart its way out of the acute phase of the pandemic with a careful, stepwise approach. It’s difficult, and there are no easy answers, but WHO continues to work nationally, regionally and globally to provide the evidence, the strategies, the tools and the technical and operational support countries need.

If countries use all of these strategies and tools in a comprehensive way, we can end the acute phase of the pandemic this year – we can end COVID-19 as a global health emergency, and we can do it this year.

What does that look like?

It means achieving our target to vaccinate 70% of the population of every country, with a focus on the most at-risk groups; It means reducing mortality through strong clinical management, beginning with primary health care, and equitable access to diagnostics, oxygen and antivirals at the point of care; It means boosting testing and sequencing rates globally to track the virus closely, and monitor the emergence of new variants;

It means the ability to calibrate the use of public health and social measures when needed;It means restoring and sustaining essential health services; And it means learning critical lessons and defining new solutions now, not waiting until the pandemic is over.We can only do this with engaged and empowered communities, sustained financing, a focus on equity, and research and innovation.

Vaccines alone are not the golden ticket out of the pandemic. But there is no path out unless we achieve our shared target of vaccinating 70% of the population of every country by the middle of this year. We have a long way to go.

As it stands, 86 Member States across all regions have not been able to reach last year’s target of vaccinating 40% of their populations – and 34 Member States, most of them in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region, have not been able to vaccinate even 10% of their populations.

85% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. How can this be acceptable to any of us? We simply cannot end the emergency phase of the pandemic unless we bridge this gap. But we can bridge it, and we are making progress.

Just a week ago, COVAX delivered its 1 billionth dose. In the past 10 weeks, COVAX shipped more vaccines than in the previous 10 months combined.

The challenges of supply we have faced in the past year are now being replaced by the challenge of rolling out vaccines as fast and far as possible. WHO and our partners are working with countries around the clock to overcome these challenges.

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