A year later – a New Year’s message from the Director-General of the WHO

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General

As people around the world celebrated New Year’s Eve 12 months ago, a new global threat emerged.

Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken so many lives and caused massive disruptions in families, societies and economies around the world.

But it has also triggered the fastest and broadest response to the global health crisis in human history.

The characteristics of this response were the incomparable mobilization of science, the search for solutions and the commitment to global solidarity.

Gifts of generosity, large and small, equipped hospitals with the tools health professionals needed to be safe and care for their patients.

Outpourings of goodness have helped the most vulnerable societies through difficult times.

Vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics have been developed and introduced at a record rate, thanks to collaboration, including the COVID-19 Tools Accelerator approach.

Capital is the essence of the ACT accelerator and its vaccine, COVAX, which has provided access to 2 billion doses of prospective vaccine candidates.

Vaccines provide great hope to reverse the tide.

But to protect the world, we need to ensure that all people who are at risk everywhere are immunized – not just in countries that can afford vaccines.

To achieve this, COVAX urgently needs just over $ 4 billion to purchase vaccines for low- and lower-middle-income countries.

This is a challenge we must face in the new year.

My brothers and sisters, the events of 2020 provided instructive lessons and reminders to all of us in 2021.

First and foremost, 2020 showed that governments must increase investment in public health, from funding access to COVID vaccines for all people, to making our systems better prepared to prevent and respond to the next, inevitable, pandemic.

At the heart of this is investing in universal health insurance to make health a reality for all.

Second, since it will take time to vaccinate everyone against COVID, we need to adhere to the tried and tested measures that keep each of us safe.

This includes maintaining physical distance, wearing face masks, practicing hand and airway hygiene, avoiding overcrowded confined spaces, and meeting people outside.

These simple but effective measures will save lives and reduce the suffering that so many people faced in 2020.

Thirdly, and above all, we must commit ourselves to solidarity, as global communities, to the promotion and protection of health today and in the future.

We have seen divisions in politics and communities feed on the virus and fuel the crisis.

But cooperation and partnership save lives and protect society.

In 2020, the health crisis of historical proportions showed us how closely we are all connected.

We saw how acts of kindness and care helped the neighbors during the great struggle.

But we are also witnessing how malicious actions and misinformation have caused unavoidable damage.

Entering 2021, we are faced with a simple but profound choice:

Are we ignoring the lessons of 2020 and allowing island, party approaches, conspiracy theories and attacks on science to prevail, resulting in unnecessary suffering for human health and society as a whole?

Or together we walk the last miles of this crisis, helping each other along the way, from sharing vaccines fairly to providing accurate advice, compassion and care to all who need it, as one global family.

The choice is simple.

There are lights at the end of the tunnel, and we will get there by a common path.

WHO stands by you – we are a family and we are in this together.

I wish you and your loved ones a peaceful, safe and healthy New Year.