Good afternoon Chancellor Merkel, Minister Spahn, Mayor Muller, Dr Tedros and esteemed colleagues,
I’ve spent most of my professional life working with so many others in this room and around the world to protect people from epidemics and other health emergencies.
Together with partners present here today we have faced the greatest Public Health crisis in generations and we are learning important lessons to drive our future actions.
Yes, we must innovate and develop global solutions/goods and share them locally but crucially we must also build local systems and connect them globally in an unbreakable chain of health protection for all the people who inhabit this fragile planet.
Indeed it is this very challenge that brings us together today.
In my experience, three things are critical to an effective response: be ready, be fast and be agile.
We must:
- Predict, Prepare and Plan for what may happen
- We must Detect, Assess and React fast to the earliest possible signal of something happening
- We must Adapt to what is happening and the reality of an evolving health emergency which is never quite what you expected
The better we prepare, the more ready we will be to respond.
The faster we can identify new infectious disease risks, the faster we can respond.
The more adaptable and agile we are the more effective our response will be.
None of this is possible without better data, analytics and insights to improve the speed and adaptability of our response.
Germany has long been a pioneer in this space. In 1848, Rudolf Virchow’s seminal outbreak response to typhus in Upper Silesia was based on collecting and analyzing data about disease and the population infected.
Virchow also knew that public health is about more than just data. He said “Medicine is a social science.”
Those words capture what I’ve experienced during every epidemic response - that the control of epidemics depends on understanding not only the disease, but also the social dimensions of how people react to it.
We’ve seen this demonstrated over and over again during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence embodies the spirit of Virchow’s insight while embracing the contemporary world of ubiquitous data, the extraordinary accessibility of computing power, and an ultra-connected global population in which information spreads even faster than disease.
- How do we link all the data that are currently available around the world to improve our public health intelligence?
- How do we create new ways to analyze this vastness of information, while at the same time ensuring equity of access to these tools?
- How can we make these insights available for decision makers globally and locally?
In short how do we turn what on the face of it is our greatest weakness in the face of epidemics...the CONNECTEDNESS that allows disease and misinformation to spread...into our greatest strength the CONNECTEDNESS that allows us to collaborate, innovate and share data, insights, innovations and solutions
These are the essential questions that the WHO Hub will address with partners from around the world.
The WHO Hub will help develop state of the art analytic tools and predictive models that will take us to a new level in our ability to collect and analyse ever more complex data.
The Hub will link communities of practice around the world to enable better data access and data sharing.
This will lead to better decisions and better outcomes for the people we all serve in the face of epidemic and pandemic threats we will face in the future.
This would not have been possible without the vision and investment of the German Government and is a major step forward as we collectively and collaboratively face future threats to the health and well-being of our people.
Thank you.