NEW YORK, JULY 14 – Addressing a side event of the 2021 UN High Level Political Forum For Sustainable Development the Italian Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marina Sereni, presented the work carried out by the G20 under the Italian Presidency, focusing on the launch of the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing Global Commons Report and on the Rome Declaration, adopted at the Global Health Summit in May. “The main objectives are increasing international financing and scaling up governance of multilateral prevention”, she said at the side event “Strengthening Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Financing the Global Commons for Global Health” co-hosted by Singapore and Italy and co-sponsored by Indonesia and SouthAfrica.
“Italy as G20 Presidency believes that the issue of pandemic preparedness needs to be prioritized in the global agenda, as it is key to the multilateral response to Covid-19 today, while representing also a defining instrument for our resilience against global health emergencies tomorrow”, said Sereni, stressing that the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over. The latest data show that “a new wave is happening in the African Continent, that the problem has been underestimated and that we must speed up the equitable distribution of vaccines”.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Italy has been at the forefront to promote a multilateral coordinating response to Covid-19. Italy is one of the main supporters of the access to Covid-19 tool accelerator Act-A, and of its vaccine pillar COVAX facility. Just a few days ago, the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, presented its report in the context of the G20 Finance Ministerial Meeting in Venice.
While its recommendations will inform discussion in preparation of the Joint Finance-Health Ministerial Meeting, that will be hosted by Italy in October, the activity itself of the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response is a concrete first step in order to make operational the Rome Declaration of principles on pandemic preparedness. The Rome Declaration was adopted at the Global Health Summit co-hosted by Italy and the European Commission, and it constitutes an important point of convergence on how to work together to defeat this pandemic and prevent the next one.
Sereni focused on two main objectives that are cross-cutting to the topic of pandemic preparedness: financing and governance.
On the firs issue, the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, highlighted the urgent need to increase international financing for pandemic prevention and preparedness by at least 75 billion dollars in the next 5 years as a bare minimum: “We know that this figure is realistic if not conservative if we compare it just with the figure of the financing gap of the Act Accelerator just for 2021 and the projections for 2022”. As far as governance, “it is crystal clear – she said – that multilateral prevention, early warning, quick response and oversight must be scaled up now, but any initiative must be synergetic with the processes launched in the context of the 74th World Health Assembly, both in terms of strengthening the WHO and of upgrading the multilateral system through the set-up of the working group that could lead potentially to a pandemic treaty”. (@OnuItalia)
