Thursday, 26 May 2021

MEDIA ADVISORY

Special press conference to mark the first anniversary of the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP)

When: Friday, 28 May from 1800 to 1900 CEST

Speakers:

• Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization
• His Excellency Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President of Costa Rica
• The Honourable Arancha González Laya, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Spain
• Professor Jesús Marco, Vice-president, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
• The Honourable Meryame Kitir, Minister of Development Cooperation, Belgium
• The Honourable Budi Gunadi Sadikin, Minister of Health, Indonesia
• Abdul Muktadir, Chairman and Managing Director, Incepta Pharmaceuticals
• Alejandra Sanchez Cabezas, Director, Observatorio de Salud, Argentina

Join the press conference by Zoom:

• Link: https://who-e.zoom.us/j/93095446666
• Password: vpcCTAP1

Or by phone:

• Webinar ID: 930 9544 6666 
• Numeric Passcode for phone access: 33322054
• International numbers available: https://who-e.zoom.us/u/adzQMUKSgO

C-TAP anniversary event

C-TAP provides a single platformfor the developers of COVID-19 vaccines, tests, devices, and medicines to temporarily share their data, know-how and technologies with quality-assured manufacturers.

This anniversary event aims to reboot C-TAP as a viable solution to challenges in global manufacturing and supply distribution of COVID-19 health technologies and universal access to these tools.

Among the several initiatives proposed, C-TAP is one that offers equal incentives to all stakeholders:

• People in low- and middle-income countries will gain faster access to desperately needed COVID-19 health products.
• Developers of COVID-19 vaccines and other health products can use C-TAP to immediately access the untapped production capacity they need to manufacture more COVID-19 health products while collecting appropriate royalties for the use of their intellectual property (IP), know-how, and data.
• With support from the technical assistance provided through WHO and C-TAP, many more manufacturers around the world can build their manufacturing know-how and begin producing quality COVID-19 vaccines and other health products to deal with eventual variants and to address future pandemics.

Today, the President of Costa Rica and the WHO Director-General issued an open letter to all WHO Members States and a call to join and actively support the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP).

Also see C-TAP: Enhancing global manufacturing capacity to address today’s and tomorrow’s pandemics briefing note.

Note to journalists

Please ensure you enter your name and media outlet (use name/outlet). Kindly note, only questions from media (one per journalist) are allowed. When you sign in you will be automatically put in the meeting room.

WHO reserves the right to remove any participant whose behaviour causes any disruption. The event is also broadcast on WHO social media channels and you can follow it there.

To ask a question, please click "raise hand" and this will enter you into the queue for questions. (It can be found under the tab: participants.) 

Please make sure you have a microphone connected or active on your computer. Do not ask questions via the chat as we cannot guarantee that we will can incorporate them into the q&a session. 

For translation during the VPC, choices are under "interpretation" or "language interpretation" depending on which version of Zoom you use.

Note that due to the volume of questions, we are no longer able to take them from phone callers and interpretation is not available via telephone. 

Media contacts:
mediainquiries@who.int

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