{"id":42122,"date":"2021-11-10T09:26:37","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T17:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=42122"},"modified":"2021-11-10T09:26:37","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T17:26:37","slug":"secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-at-a-virtual-covid-19-ministerial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=42122","title":{"rendered":"Secretary Antony J. Blinken Remarks at A Virtual COVID-19 Ministerial"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
11\/10\/2021 10:01 AM EST<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State<\/p>\n

Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

SECRETARY BLINKEN:<\/strong>\u00a0 Good morning, everyone.\u00a0 Good afternoon.\u00a0 Good evening.\u00a0 Thank you so much for joining us from time zones around the world.\u00a0 Greatly appreciate everyone coming together today.<\/p>\n

Many of our countries participated in President Biden\u2019s Global COVID-19 Summit back in September where we set the ambitious goal of ending the pandemic by the UN General Assembly next fall.\u00a0 I\u2019m hoping the work that we do today, and in the days to follow, will help us stay on track toward that goal.\u00a0 This is the first time that we foreign ministers have gathered for the sole purpose of discussing how to end the COVID-19 pandemic since this began nearly two years ago.<\/p>\n

This pandemic has taught us that preventing and responding to global health emergencies cannot be the responsibility only of health ministers or global health experts, because a pandemic isn\u2019t just a health crisis.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a security crisis, an economic crisis, a humanitarian crisis.\u00a0 That\u2019s why we need foreign ministers to step up and lead as well, and I hope this is the first of many regular discussions among us about global health security.\u00a0 We also need development ministers to lead, and USAID Administrator Power will convene her counterparts later this year to discuss how they can work together to help bring the pandemic to an end.<\/p>\n

Today what I hope to focus on is, of course, the current emergency, particularly the need to accelerate the equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide.\u00a0 To put this in context, in North America, in Europe, more than half the population is fully vaccinated.\u00a0 In Africa, less than 10 percent of the population is.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got to close that gap.\u00a0 We support the WHO\u2019s goal to vaccinate at least 70 percent of the world by next September, in every country and every income category with quality, safe, and effective vaccines.<\/p>\n

To do this, we all need to step up our efforts to boost production, to increase vaccine donations, to fulfill the pledges we\u2019ve made to COVAX and help solve the last-mile challenges \u2013 for example, figuring out the logistics of storing and delivering millions of vaccine doses safely and supporting health care workers at a time when they\u2019re badly overstretched.\u00a0 And we have to fully commit to transparency and accountability, which are essential for measuring our progress and meeting our goals.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll also talk today about the future because we foreign ministers have a critical role to play in laying the foundation for stronger health security beyond this pandemic.\u00a0 We\u2019re uniquely positioned to address gaps in global governance so our countries can respond to health crises with the same urgency and immediacy that we bring to national security crises, sharpen regional coordination to improve preparedness and response, and strengthen key institutions like the WHO to modernize it and make sure it has the resources it needs to take on future pandemics more effectively.<\/p>\n

We also need to figure out how to sustainably finance public health systems around the world so countries and regions can be better prepared to prevent, detect, and respond to future emergencies.\u00a0 We\u2019re stuck in a cycle of spending lots of money when a crisis hits, and then letting that funding dry up after the crisis is over, which means we fail to stop the next one from happening or have to play catch up.<\/p>\n

As diplomatic leaders, we have to help build and sustain the political will to break that cycle.\u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to announce a few recent steps that will help us reach our goals.\u00a0 First, the IMF, the WHO, the WTO, the World Bank, the ACT Accelerator have created a comprehensive COVID data tracker.\u00a0 For the first time, the latest information on COVID worldwide will be gathered in one place, from vaccination rates to ICU admissions to doses pledged and doses delivered.\u00a0 The tracker is launching today.\u00a0 It\u2019s publicly accessible at a website, COVID19globaltracker.org.\u00a0 It will grow as more data is added.<\/p>\n

And it will help provide two critical elements for stopping the pandemic: transparency, because we need a centralized source of data to stay ahead of COVID, and accountability, because we all need to follow through on our commitments.\u00a0 Second, we know it\u2019s not enough simply to deliver vaccines to a country.\u00a0 Countries then need to turn those vaccines into vaccinations, shots in arms.\u00a0 And we\u2019re seeing how complicated that can be.\u00a0 A new public-private partnership called the Global COVID Corps will help.\u00a0 Through this initiative, leading private sector companies will work pro bono to share their expertise and capabilities to support vaccination campaigns, taking on issues like managing supply chains and helping optimize vaccine sites to deliver shots as quickly and safely as possible.\u00a0 The private sector has unique skills and resources to bring to bear in this fight.\u00a0 Let\u2019s make the most of them.<\/p>\n

Finally, we need to ensure that people who cannot be reached by government vaccination campaigns aren\u2019t left out of our efforts.\u00a0 They need to be protected too.\u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to share that the United States has helped broker a deal between J&J and COVAX to facilitate the first delivery of J&J vaccines to people living in conflict zones and other humanitarian settings.\u00a0 We\u2019re eager for people in these difficult circumstances to get protection against COVID-19 as soon as possible.\u00a0 We know the urgency of this fight.\u00a0 We know what we need to do to stop the pandemic.\u00a0 Now, we\u2019ve got to do it.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got to be ambitious because ending this pandemic demands it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got to be relentless because this pandemic is relentless.\u00a0 And we have to be coordinated and united because that\u2019s what a global health emergency like this requires.\u00a0 So I hope we can make the most of our time together today and in the days ahead.\u00a0 Let\u2019s keep up this work together as we move forward to save lives now and to strengthen global health security for the future.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much to everyone for joining us today, and I look forward to a very good conversation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11\/10\/2021 10:01 AM EST   Antony...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42123,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42122\/revisions\/42123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}