Your Excellency, Dr Lotay Tshering, Hon’ble Prime Minister; Your Excellency, Dr Tandi Dorji, Hon’ble Minister for Foreign Affairs; Your Excellency, Dasho Dechen Wangmo, Minister of Health, Royal Government of Bhutan; Hon’ble Ministers of Health from countries of the WHO South-East Asia Region; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, WHO; Dr Catharina Boehme, Chef de Cabinet of the D-G; Colleagues from the international community and from across WHO; Representatives of United Nations and Specialized Agencies, inter-governmental organizations and non-state actors; distinguished delegates,
It is my immense pleasure to be here today to embark on this Seventy-fifth Session of the WHO Regional Committee for South-East Asia.
My special thanks to Your Excellency, Dr Tshering, and to the Hon’ble Dr Dorji, for gracing this occasion.
My thanks to Your Excellency, the Hon’ble Minister of Health, Dasho Dechen Wangmo, for your warm welcome and inspiring words.
And my sincere gratitude to our hosts for bringing this Committee together at what is a defining moment in the history of public health.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not over. We know all too well to expect the unexpected.
But across the Region, it is apparent that countries and communities are learning to live with COVID-19, while at the same time refusing to give the virus a free ride.
We have witnessed tremendous resilience.
Bangladesh has continued to maintain routine immunization coverage, which by as early as June 2020, it had fully restored – a remarkable and globally recognized achievement.
Bhutan has reached almost 90% coverage of the primary COVID-19 vaccine series, and has also trained more than 20 000 frontline workers in psychological first aid.
DPR Korea has continued to strengthen surveillance for influenza-like illness and severe acute respiratory infections.
India has mobilized Accredited Social Health Activists to participate in the world’s largest vaccination drive against COVID-19, which by mid-July had administered more than 2 billion vaccine doses – a historic achievement.
Indonesia became the first country globally to start production of the novel oral polio vaccine Type 2. This vaccine is being used extensively in several countries to control outbreaks of Type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus.
Maldives became one of the first countries in the Region to complete a post-introduction evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccine, jointly with the HPV vaccine, which is now part of the routine vaccination schedule for girls of 10 years of age.
Nepal is now implementing a new National Strategic Plan for TB – a commendable show of commitment and intent.
Sri Lanka became the first country of the Region to develop a National Strategic Plan to reach the global targets for cervical cancer elimination by 2030.
Thailand’s National Regulatory Authority for vaccines has reached maturity level 3, the second highest in the WHO classification of national regulatory systems.
Timor-Leste has finalized an Essential Services Package for primary care, so that all Timorese have access to the right care right in the community.
Ministries of health and government health agencies in Bhutan and India – and a nongovernmental organization in Indonesia – have also been nominated for the 2022 UN NCD Taskforce & WHO Special Programme on Primary Health Care Awards, which will be announced later this month, at the UN General Assembly high-level week.
My congratulations to you all. I commend Your Excellencies on the outstanding resilience and solidarity you have shown throughout the COVID-19 response, which must continue to define how we as a Region prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from acute public health events.
Indeed, for several months now, the Region has also been preparing for and responding to a new and very different public health emergency of international concern – the multi-country outbreak of monkeypox.
In public health we can never relax.
For the foreseeable future, we will continue to grapple with these and other health emergencies – and the broader health, social and economic recovery – amid a global economic downturn that the World Bank predicts will reduce global growth from 5.7% in 2021 to 2.9% in 2022.
So, as we embark on this Regional Committee meeting – the first in-person Committee meeting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – we have both cause for optimism and cause for concern at the choppy waters ahead.
How exactly we approach and navigate those waters is up to us.
How we as a Region choose to recover from the COVID-19 crisis will determine how we protect our many public health achievements, from maintaining our polio-free status, to continuing to eliminate neglected tropical diseases and other diseases on the verge of elimination, be it lymphatic filariasis, kala-azar, trachoma or malaria.
It will determine if and how we as a Region sustain and accelerate progress towards our eight Flagship Priorities, the Triple Billion targets and health-related Sustainable Development Goals, all of which depend on hastening progress towards universal health coverage, with a focus on reorienting health systems towards strong primary health care.
And it will also determine the level of preparedness and resilience that we as a Region have established when together we face – as we may – the next public health crisis.
So much is at stake and so much depends on the decisions we make now, and in the weeks and months ahead.
It is a privilege to be in Bhutan, a country that has pioneered Gross National Happiness and that has for decades championed accessible, affordable, and quality primary health care, not just for health, but for overall social and economic development.
I very much welcome Bhutan’s leadership at this Regional Committee to highlight the need to promote and protect mental health, and to ensure that mental health services reach all those in need, closer to where they live, without financial hardship.
I wish this Seventy-fifth Session of the Regional Committee all success, for a South-East Asia Region that continues to build back better, more equitable and resilient health systems, together.
Thank you.