23 February, 2022  

WHO Director-General's remarks at Ports to Arms – 23 February 2022

Your Excellency President Muhammadu Buhari,

Your Excellency Hakainde Hichilema,

My sister Yodi,

Distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends,

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity of joining you today.

I would like to take a moment to join you in mourning the untimely passing of our colleague, and my friend, Paul Farmer. Paul was a great humanitarian, and a tireless champion of equity and health as a human right. He will be deeply missed.

I thank Yodi for acknowledging Paul in yesterday’s programme. And thank you, Yodi, for your leadership in bringing us all together, and for your excellent work as Special Envoy for the ACT Accelerator.

This week marks one year since COVAX made its first delivery in Africa -- to Ghana.

Unfortunately, vaccine nationalism and manufacturers prioritizing high-income countries severely limited the number of vaccines COVAX was able to supply in the first half of last year.

As a result, 83% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose.

This is not only a moral failure, it is also an epidemiological failure, which is creating the ideal conditions for new variants to emerge.

Through COVAX, we are now overcoming many of the supply and delivery constraints we faced last year, with almost 1.2 billion doses of vaccine delivered, and the supply outlook for this year is positive.

Through purchased and donated doses, COVAX has secured enough vaccines to achieve 45% coverage across recipient countries by the middle of this year.

Other sources, including through our partner AVAT, provide the means for countries to reach the global target of 70% by mid-2022.

We must now turn our attention to addressing the crucial question of how we turn vaccines into vaccinations – or how we get vaccines from ports to arms.

Protecting the highest priority groups, including all health workers, older adults, and those with underlying medical conditions, must remain our urgent and immediate focus, to prevent severe disease, save lives, and safeguard essential health services.

WHO and our ACT Accelerator partners are working night and day to address the bottlenecks that remain, in partnership with countries, AVAT, the Africa CDC, funders, manufacturers and civil society. We are on the ground, with you, to do whatever it takes to reach country goals not only on vaccines but for testing and treatment.

We have also taken steps to facilitate voluntary sharing of technology, intellectual property, know-how and data, including the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, and the mRNA Technology Transfer Hub in South Africa, which has already developed its own mRNA vaccine candidate.

Just last week we announced the first six African countries that will receive technology from the hub to produce their own vaccines, including Nigeria.

WHO has now identified 20 countries that have expressed interest in mRNA vaccine development training by the South African hub.

Later today, we will also be announcing the establishment of a global biomanufacturing training hub. This second hub will provide countries working with the mRNA vaccine technology hub with the broader workforce training to turn novel technologies into large scale manufactured doses of vaccine and other products.

Of course, this whole process would be accelerated if manufacturers were willing to share their intellectual property and know-how with the hub.

We strongly support the proposal from South Africa and India for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights under the TRIPS agreement for the duration of the pandemic. 

The flexibilities in the TRIPS agreement are there to be used in emergencies. If not now, then when?

We need to pull out all the stops to achieve the 70% vaccine coverage target by the middle of this year, as well as the minimum targets for testing, treatments and PPE coverage.

Achieving the 70% target in all countries is essential for ending the pandemic as a global health emergency and driving a truly inclusive global recovery.

It will also help prevent the emergence of new variants, which could be more severe or transmissible next time around.

High level political leadership and accountability in elevating COVID-19 vaccination as a national and sub-national priority is an essential condition for success.

To support these actions, WHO, UNICEF and Gavi have initiated the COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership, to assist government-led vaccine strategies through political engagement, delivery funding, technical assistance and surge support.

This partnership will bring the tools, training, and expertise to strengthen cold chains and logistics, deploy vaccinators, mobilize funding, strengthen data systems, engage communities, and plan and coordinate operations.

Thank you all for your commitment. Actions speak louder than words – so let’s get to work, to get vaccines from ports to arms, and end COVID-19 as a global health emergency.

I thank you.

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