Meeting:  
Seventy-fourth World Health Assembly

Agenda Item:
Constituency Statement on Agenda item 17 and Agenda item 18

Statement:
The Constituency Call On WHA For Better Co-Ordination For Action On COVID-19

This constituency consisting of major international federations of global health, primary care, and social work professionals supports the WHO in its call on its member states to work together on the co-design and co-production of coordinated strategies to control the pandemic.

Where countries have struggled to implement effective COVID-19 control, political leadership has often undermined the critical role of skilled frontline professionals. The greatest success has been achieved between the government, professionals, trade unions, and communities working together with a high level of mutual trust. Where this has occurred there has been an important increased control of the virus allowing countries to resume freedoms and functional economies.

We call on WHO and its member states to take action to:

• Ensure that treatments and vaccines are available to everyone everywhere. This requires establishing multidisciplinary engagement with local up to cross-borders social protection systems to reach all people.
• Transform COVAX into a COVID-19 Solidarity Pooling Platform, enabling knowledge sharing as well as boosting production capacity under a public health-driven alliance of vaccine manufacturers, dedicated to research, development, manufacturing, and supply of high-quality, efficient, safe and sustainable vaccines and treatments.
• Increase preparedness including health literacy while decreasing vulnerability to future pandemics through reducing health and social inequalities that have undermined the current interventions in controlling this pandemic.
• Establish a clear partnership between the politicians and the health, social, and trade unions’ professionals to build public trust and engagement.

The Coalition stands ready and committed to fully utilize the skills, networks, and competencies in supporting the WHO and its member states to advance these solutions. We call on member states to build their strategies on the human rights-based approach to guarantee equal access to the highest attainable standard of health, to build concrete, healthy, socially equitable, and environmentally sustainable solutions for the short and long term.

Submitted by:

• World Federation of Public Health Associations
• International Federation on Ageing
• International Hospital Federation
• International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
• World Organization of Family Doctors
• World Federation of Occupational Therapists
• International League of Dermatological Societies

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