EFE
The World Health Summit was inaugurated today in Berlin between calls to raise health to the highest level of global priorities and alerts not to neglect the fight against malaria or polio, while all attention is focused on the pandemic of coronavirus.
“Health is not a cost, it is an investment,” emphasized the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the opening ceremony of a summit that will last three days of sessions and which is considered the largest international event in this area of the year.
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic, on a health, social and economic scale, must be taken advantage of “to raise health to the highest level” in the set of priorities of the political sphere and also of investment, public or private, said Tedros.
There must be a “generational commitment” aimed at finally seeing health spending as an “investment,” added the general director of the PMS.
The coronarius pandemic revealed “the vulnerability” to which the world continues to be exposed, both the most developed and the one that still does not have “adequate and equitable access to the vaccine,” Tedros recalled.
It is not, however, the only vulnerability that continues to affect the world’s population in terms of health, because the task of eradicating polio in the less industrialized world is still pending.
The fight against polio will occupy the sessions of the so-called Conference of Donors against this disease, which intends to collect 4,800 million euros in the next four years.
In a virtual message addressed to Congress, the American billionaire and patron Bill Gates announced a donation of up to 1,200 million euros for this fund against polio, a disease that continues to wreak havoc in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz also referred to the fight against polio in his message of greeting. After requesting that those diseases that, for the most industrialized world, are already considered overcome, are not “left out of focus”, he announced an item of 35 million euros for that global fund.
The pandemic revealed the importance of “following the advice of scientists,” Scholz continued. These, in turn, reacted and managed to develop vaccines to combat it “in an incredibly short time”, which shows the “imperative need” to invest in research, as well as in health.
