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Africa

Africa: WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks At the World Health Summit – 13 October 2024

todayOctober 14, 2024

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Professor Axel Pries,

Professor Beate Kampmann,

Dear colleagues and friends,

Guten abend. As always, I am delighted to be here.

As a founding member of the organising committee for the first World Health Summit in 2009, and now as a patron, it gives me great satisfaction to see how this event has grown.

And I’m very proud that in a few moments, WHO and the World Health Summit will sign a new Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen our partnership even more.

Thank you, Axel and Beate, for your leadership, partnership and support, and I look forward to working with you even more closely in the years ahead.

Strong partnerships – like strong relationships – are built on trust.

Trust has always been the foundation of medicine and public health.

Trust itself does not make people healthy; but no one can be healthy without trust.

People won’t use a medicine they don’t trust, or see a health worker they don’t trust, or follow advice they don’t trust.

And when trust breaks down, the consequences can be deadly.

During the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2018 to 2020, transmission was being fuelled by certain burial customs that involved touching and kissing the deceased.

Initially, health workers responded by removing dead bodies from families.

But that created significant community resistance and loss of trust.

Through careful engagement with civil society and communities, we were able to design burial practices that were both safe and dignified, and acceptable to the communities.

In short, we built trust.

This was a key step in helping to bring the outbreak under control.

Trust can be broken easily and for many reasons.

Sometimes it’s because the care people receive is unsafe.

Sometimes it’s because care is unaffordable or inaccessible.

Sometimes it’s because people are excluded from social participation or social protection.

And sometimes it’s because people receive the wrong information.

Internet and social media platforms have given people unprecedented access to health information.

But they have also turbo charged the spread of mis- and disinformation, which has contributed to mistrust in vaccines and other health interventions, fuelled stigma and discrimination, and even led to violence against health workers and marginalized groups.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, falsehoods about masks, vaccines and “lockdowns” spread as fast as the virus itself, and were almost as deadly.

Just as mis- and disinformation undermined the response to the pandemic itself, so it continues to undermine negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement.

Media, celebrities, social media influencers and politicians have spread false claims that the Agreement will cede national sovereignty to WHO and give it the power to impose “lockdowns” or vaccine mandates on countries.

As you know, these claims are, of course, entirely false. Sovereign governments are negotiating the agreement; and sovereign governments will implement it, in accordance with their own national laws.

It’s easy to blame, dismiss, ridicule or insult those who believe or spread mis- or disinformation.

To be sure, governments and internet and social media companies have a responsibility to prevent the spread of harmful lies and promote access to accurate health information.

WHO is working with a range of companies and researchers and partners to understand how misinformation and disinformation spreads, who is targeted, how they’re influenced, and what we can do to counter this problem.

But we must also make sure that when we seek the trust of others, we are ourselves trustworthy.

We cannot assume or expect trust; we must earn it.

That begins with listening to the people we serve, to understand their needs and preferences, and the reasons they believe mis- and disinformation.

It means designing and delivering health services that are safe, accessible, affordable, and people-centred;

It means providing and promoting health information that is accurate and culturally sensitive;

And it means delivering results.

This applies to all of us – governments, health providers, researchers, funders, civil society – and WHO.

One way WHO is doing this is by actively listening to young people, and engaging them in solutions. This is why we established the WHO Youth Council, many of their members who are here today.

I would like to thank the WHO Youth Council for drafting the first Youth Declaration on Creating Healthy Societies, which will be launched at the World Health Summit tomorrow.

Everything we do depends on the trust of the communities we serve, the partners with whom we work, and the Member States who set the global health agenda, and entrust us with the resources to deliver it.

At this year’s World Health Assembly, Member States adopted a new and ambitious strategy to save 40 million lives over the next four years: the 14th General Programme of Work.

Delivering that strategy requires a strong and sustainably financed WHO, which is why we have launched the first WHO Investment Round, to mobilize upfront the predictable funding we need to do our work over the next four years.

I thank His Excellency Chancellor Scholz, the government of Germany and the World Health Summit for offering to host a pledging event for the Investment Round, to be held in this room at 6 p.m. tomorrow.

We know that we are making this ask at a time of competing priorities and limited resources.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, when health is at risk, everything is at risk.

Investments in WHO are therefore investments not only in healthier populations, but also in more equitable, more stable and more secure societies and economies.

They’re investments in the vision countries had when they established WHO in 1948: the highest attainable standard of health for all people, as a fundamental right.

As I always like to say, Gesundheit ist ein menschenrecht!

Finally, I just want to say a few words about peace. I hope next year’s theme will be peace.

I just came back from a visit to Sudan and Chad. Sudan is in a serious problem. Half of its population needs aid. A quarter of its population is displaced.

The horror we heard from mothers who fled to Chad is heartbreaking. Many of them told us that their homes were burned, their crops were destroyed and their cattle stolen.