New Delhi, Oct 29: Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya today addressed the G20 Joint Finance and Health Ministers’ Meeting through video conferencing.

The agenda of the discussion was “Concrete proposals to strengthen global health financing governance”.

The text of the speech of Dr. Mandaviya is as under:

“India would like to congratulate Italian Presidency’s efforts towards strengthening global health financing and its governance.

Chair,

COVID-19 pandemic has brought to fore the importance of International Health Regulations and the need for strengthening global health governance. Presently, several parallel proposals are being discussed in multiple forums including IPPPR’s Global Health Threats Council, IHR review, need for a framework, convention or any other instrument on pandemic management and G20 proposal of Joint Health and Financing Task force to strengthen pandemic preparedness and response.

While supporting the present proposal for Joint Health and Financing Task force, India proposes that centrality of WHO needs to be maintained in health arena. India also proposes that while multiple entities with overlapping mandates are delving on the issue of pandemic preparedness and response, a clearly defined complementarity of all such initiatives being seamlessly woven to create a global health emergency management architecture is the need of hour. There is also a need to synchronise these multilateral initiatives amongst member states as per their local context at national level.

G20 needs to aid in increasing available funds to WHO, primarily funds which are not ear-marked besidessupporting ongoing multi stakeholder mechanisms such as GAVI, CEPI, ACT-A with specific focus on equitable and affordable access. In a pandemic no one is safe until everyone is safe. In this context, I quote our Hon’ble Prime Minister Mr. Modi ji when he mentioned that “Everyone’s support, everyone’s development, everyone’s trust and everyone’s efforts” are vital for success.