The Joint Technical Symposium held on 16 December by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) highlighted that the world can move quickly when driven by a crisis situation, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cooperation is a key factor to foster innovation and timely equitable access to health products — for COVID-19 and in preparation for future pandemics.
WIPO Director General Daren Tang, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala opened the Symposium.
They pointed out the need to leverage lessons learned during the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and to build on and expand the cooperation that has emerged from this health crisis.
“There is no certainty when the next pandemic will strike us, but there is absolute certainty that it will happen again. We can and must do better the next time it happens, for ourselves and our children. I hope that today’s trilateral symposium will bring us closer together and strengthen our collective will to work across the agencies, alongside our partners in the Member States, industry and civil society, to deliver a better, healthier and more sustainable outcome for our world," said WIPO Director-General Daren Tang.
"Today's symposium is about frank, inclusive and empirically grounded dialogue about how global trade and intellectual property rules contributed to what went well - and what did not – with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This will help lay the foundation for better responses to future global health crises," said WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
“Despite all the gains we have made in the past three years, severe global inequities still hamper the response,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The keynote address was delivered by Salim Abdool Karim, Director of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa and Professor of Global Health, Columbia University.
