development
  

Period. 14 - 17 September 2020

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are felt across all sectors, with cascading and compounding social, environmental, economic and political effects that are global in nature, and that cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. Protecting health is critical to economic, social, and political security. The chronic underfunding of WHO and the dearth of global financing for pandemic preparedness has limited the Organization’s capacity to fulfill its mandate in responding to health emergencies and undermined its autonomy, but also has been a major impediment to both national and global preparedness. In addition to direct and secondary health impacts, the global collective experience with COVID-19 has also demonstrated its cascading impacts on social services, reversing economic gains, aggravating gender-based violence, disrupting education, creating food insecurity and exacerbated inequities within and between countries.

Perhaps the most important building block to effective pandemic preparedness is governance.[55] It is imperative to pre-emptively build a legal and policy foundation to guide responses to shocks, covering all levels of the health system, private and non-profit sectors, international agencies and inter-sectoral coordination. Planning for shocks, building networks, and appropriate decentralisation to allow decision-making by local managers can help provide a platform for responding to shocks when they occur. Furthermore, shocks often affect countries in multiple ways, and interdependencies with other sectors, such as social protection, water, sanitation, nutrition, and disaster risk management need to be identified and planned for in advance.

  1. Support the most vulnerable and guarantee funding for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ US$10.3 billion call for the immediate global humanitarian response to COVID-19 in fragile countries.[56]
  2. Ensure US$35 billion to fund the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator initiative as a global public good and support global scientific collaboration to accelerate the development, production, equitable and affordable access to COVID diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.[57]
  3. Engage proactive collaborative leadership globally, regionally and nationally and provide necessary funding commitments to ensure the implementation of the urgent pandemic preparedness actions that will prepare the world for future health emergencies as set out by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.[58]

 


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