Csaba Kőrösi, President of the 77th session of the General Assembly
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Press stakeout by the President and the six co-facilitators for health-related processes
9 May 2023
(Partial transcript; Q&A to follow)
President Kőrösi: Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for your interest, your time, and your dedication. Many, many thanks for your work in supporting the activities in the transformation going on in the General Assembly.
You might have heard me and others speak in this house that it is a time of unprecedented and interlocking crises in the world. And responding on that, it is and it must be a year of crisis management and transformation in the General Assembly. That’s what we tried to achieve in the Water Conference last March. That’s what we are trying to achieve during the Sendai Framework Review a couple of days from now, and that is our main focus on the HLPF in July. And that will be the main objective of all the Member States in the high-level week in September, in a few months from now.
There are clear objectives in front of us: revitalize the sustainability transformation, its financial support, find game changing solutions of integrated nature, seek stability for the people and planet, and advance peace and security particularly by recommitting to nuclear non-proliferation.
You may know that there are 16 negotiating processes going on in the General Assembly. It is unprecedented in our history. Thirteen of the 16 are directly related to some type of transformation we are trying to achieve in this house and in the world.
The human dimension of this transformation is very closely characterized by three health-related negotiation processes on TB preparedness, pandemic preparedness, and universal health coverage. We are very strongly relying on the conviction of the Member States and other stakeholders that when health is at risk, everything is at risk.
We are deeply convinced that health is not and cannot be a luxury, but a fundamental human right.
We are also deeply convinced that providing health is not a money pit, but an investment in sustainable development.
So in September at the second half of the high-level week, we are going to have on pandemic preparedness, fighting TB, and universal health coverage.
Today, we are having multistakeholder hearings, actually started yesterday with Tuberculosis. Today with the lessons learned from the pandemic preparedness, and this afternoon, we are going to have the multistakeholder hearing on universal health coverage.
Let me start with universal health coverage. It’s a type of “umbrella” of health goals for the Agenda 2030.
It’s about providing good health coverage to all, each and every member of our community on this planet without incurring unbearable financial hardship.
There might be different way, different methods how to provide it, how to achieve it, in different countries. The most important that the universal health coverage should be achieved.
In 2018, there has been already a joint declaration of all Member States in the General Assembly that by 2030 we would want to achieve the universal health coverage. We are off track. So what we need to decide in the forthcoming weeks and months with the help of the stakeholders, how to go back to our original goal and how to deliver for our people.
I’m very grateful for the Ambassadors of Guyana (Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett), standing behind me, together with the Ambassador of Thailand (Suriya Chindawongse), for leading this negotiating process.
They are doing very good work, hard work of the Membership, and they are in the process of reaching a detailed negotiation on concrete outcome task. For the time being, we are gathering information from various actors, including nurses, doctors, science actors, civil society actors, companies and state actors.
On Tuberculosis, it’s a preventable and curable disease. We even have some remarkable success. Since 2000, we could save about 72 million lives by the measures we implemented in our countries. Yet it still remains a silent killer.
Just in 2021 alone, 1.6 million people died because of tuberculosis and 16 million fell sick with it.
It is one of the leading causes of death across the world, and we know it is linked with inequity, poverty, undernutrition. And what we need is further research for new vaccines, new drugs capable of preventing new strains of bacteria and curing the disease.
Behind me you can see His Excellency Krzysztof Szczerski, Ambassador of Poland, and Bakhtiyor Ibragimov, the Ambassador of Uzbekistan. I am grateful for them for leading the negotiations of the Member States involving many other stakeholders to create a common knowledge base and start very soon the text-based negotiations of Member States.
Last but not least, the COVID-19 revealed the nature, the very dangerous nature of the prototype of Anthropocene era crisis. The pandemic officially is over, but the lessons still to be learned for the future.
These are bitter lessons. We know that might be officially over but the next one is in the making. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, and we don’t know from what kind of virus or bacteria it would come.
Btu we have to understand our shortcomings, we have to understand our mistakes in the process of handling the pandemic, and we have to make the best decisions to be better prepared. Once again, the question is not whether or not we are going to have a next danger from the pandemic but the question is when it comes, and whether or not we are prepared or not.
So I’m grateful to the two ambassadors of Morocco (Omar Hilale) and Israel (Gilad Erdan) for leading the Member State preparations and negotiations for the political declarations that will be adopted at the highest levels during the September high-level week.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For these three major human-centred processes, we need everybody onboard. We need all the stakeholders onboard. We need commitments, the global community tackling health-related crises, but we also need to know it’s not purely a health-issue. It’s an issue for policymaking. Issue for financing. Issue for scientific progress. Issue for technological advancement. Issue of how we build trust among ourselves and how to rebuild networks of our cooperation.
And before wrapping up, I want to thank the World Health Organization’s support in organizing’s this week’s hearing and the general providing assistance for the negotiating processes for the General Assembly.
Question and Answer
PassBlue: I’m wondering how you can prepare for the next pandemic if you don’t know where it’s going to happen, or how it will happen. It’s a complete mystery. Thanks.
President Kőrösi: I wish we knew exactly what kind of virus or bacteria would come. You might have heard about the research which is called the DAMA Protocol research. DAMA is trying to identify those, mostly viruses, that have the most potential making the big jump to the human body. We know that there are about eight strains on the watchlist now but the number of the potential bugs are much, much higher. But this is not what we can decide here in the General Assembly. It is a job for researchers, for scientists. Our job is to draw lessons learned from our mistakes. What we have done in the last couple of years, how we organize ourselves in terms of medical supplies, how we mobilized our finances for fighting the pandemic, how we used the scientific knowledge of political decision making and how we show solidarity during the fight against the pandemic. If we draw our lessons learned from that, we do our part of the work, and we are asking the scientists, the scientific community to come for our help, to help us at the highest possible probability, when and what kind of strains of viruses and bacteria could come the next. It is still an unknown but we are focusing on them, the potential source of danger.
Preventing Pandemics at the Source: Thank you for your leadership on this throughout the day. Yesterday, as well on TB. A lot around multisectoral collaboration came up in the room today and cross-collaboration and coordination between Governments. You also mentioned Anthropocene. And we know that climate change drives emerging pandemics. So, how do you see climate conversations and health conversations convening at a very high level through this and can there be better synergies created between these two sectors in these forums, so that that can be spilled over into national and regional congregations and in academia as well?
President Kőrösi: I couldn’t agree more with you. Climate change itself does not cause pandemics. But climate change creates conditions that are very conducive for pandemics. It amplifies some of the factors, including those that might be favourable for the spreading of new type of bacteria or viruses. It is not by surprise that during the High-Level Week we are going to have a Climate Ambition Summit, and on the same day, we are going to have with just a few hours difference, the health-related summit. There are quite a few areas which have a great impact on our preparedness for the next pandemic. But obviously, how we treat, how we try to prevent or how we get accommodated to the next wave of global warming will have a great impact on how we are going to weather the pandemics of the near future. But it is not only climate change that has an impact on the potential of the new pandemics. The closer we get to nature, the habitats that were untouched for thousands of years by humanity, the more will be the immediate physical contacts between those carriers of the diseases and human beings.
That is what we see now on a yearly basis with the outbreak of very rare diseases coming from those areas where the natural habitat and the human habitat are meeting. Unfortunately, we know, we noticed that there is a new outbreak of Marburg disease in Africa, for the similar reason.
Indo-Asian News Service: Right now, TB is probably the biggest killer since we passed the COVID pandemic. Are you trying to get laboratories, especially in the private sector, involved in developing a vaccine for it, which has been a massive failure so far?
President Kőrösi: The private sector is here with us in the multi-stakeholder discussions. Yes, without them, we cannot solve this problem. Governments alone, NGOs alone cannot prevent the next pandemic. We need the private sector and we need the science community. We need new solutions, and we need new methods of implementing those solutions. There were rightly many critical words to “Big Pharma” during the pandemic. But we have to acknowledge that without the scientific breakthrough, which was achieved at the beginning of this pandemic, we would not have been able to prevent much more lives to be lost. So, my message to the private sector: Yes, you have a role. You have your own responsibility. Please, come work with us. We are counting on you. And your words are also counting in our final decisions.
President Kőrösi: Thank you much indeed. And let me just call to your kind attention that, in the course of the further negotiations on all three tracks, the Ambassadors behind me, whom once again I would like to thank for their wonderful work, would be at your disposal for your convenience, to be addressed, to ask questions, or give you a background information on the course of the negotiations.
Thank you very much and I wish you a nice day.
