The COVID pandemic has taken four million lives, devastated the global economy, pushed a further 124 million people into extreme poverty and continues to inflict profound suffering – dramatically impacting progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN chief said. “Nearly one person in three around the world could not access adequate food in 2020 – an increase of nearly 320 million people in one year”, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Opening of the Ministerial Segment of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

“Gender equality is essentially about power, and power in a world that is still largely male dominated, with a culture that is still largely patriarchal”, Secretary-General António Guterres said at the Generation Equality Forum, launching a “five-year action journey”, based on the UN Global Acceleration Plan for Gender Equality. Noting that “power is very rarely given. You have to take it”, he stressed as one of his five priorities, the importance of parity to redistribute power and create the necessary conditions for true equality.  

The European Union (EU) must use its leverage to ensure people everywhere have access to COVID-19 vaccines, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. In a wide-ranging multilingual speech to the European Parliament in Brussels, the UN chief underscored the need to ramp up vaccinations globally. “The pandemic is causing more deaths today than a year ago.  And vaccines are our only way out of this crisis. They must be considered as a global public good, available and affordable to all,” he said. 

António Guterres was re-appointed to a second term as UN Secretary-General, pledging as his priority, to continue helping the world chart a course out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking the oath of office in the General Assembly Hall, Mr. Guterres said he was aware of the immense responsibilities bestowed on him at this critical moment in history. “We are truly at a crossroads, with consequential choices before us. Paradigms are shifting. Old orthodoxies are being flipped,” he told ambassadors. 

Lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines should be considered “global public goods”, the UN chief told journalists, covering the G7 Summit of leading industrialized nations taking place in the United Kingdom. Speaking via videolink in London, Secretary-General António Guterres said there was no other way of defeating a virus that spreads across developing countries “like wildfire” and risks mutating, other than through equitable, mass vaccination, adding that shots need to be “available and affordable to all”.