COVID-19 can only be defeated if countries shun nationalism and are not “selfish,” Costa Rica’s president said on Friday, urging access to diagnostics and treatment tools for everyone as a major meeting of the WHO’s members looms.
Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado joined WHO officials for an online news conference to outline a worldwide “technology repository” for vaccines, medicines and diagnostics, seeking to boost solidarity before the World Health Assembly tomorrow and on Tuesday — at which rivals China and the US are to share a stage on the fight against the novel coronavirus.
“It’s an opportunity for humanity to show the best of what we are made of,” Alvarado said, speaking from Costa Rica, referring to the repository, which is to be formally launched on May 29. “Only together, only with multilateralism, only with that kind of leadership, we can defeat coronavirus — not closing in nationalisms, not being selfish.”
Photo: Reuters
Such calls for solidarity are likely to be tested in the coming days.
Usually the WHO’s biggest annual event, the assembly is to be conducted online and is billed as a “de minimis” version focusing only on the COVID-19 pandemic.
A handful of world leaders, plus many health ministers, are expected to take part.
The WHO hopes that conditions will improve so an assembly with a far broader agenda can be held before the end of this year.
EU member states and several other countries have prepared a resolution that aims to boost solidarity, ensure equitable access to treatment tools and reaffirm commitments to protect human rights that might be strained at a time of broad restrictions on travel, trade and movement —among other things.
One unknown was how much US President Donald Trump’s administration, which has criticized the WHO for being too cozy with China amid the pandemic, and others will press to have Taiwan granted observer status over the objections of China.
A two-minute speech by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar is likely to get attention.
The US mission in Geneva this week said the US believes that Taiwan’s “successful actions in response to COVID-19 would be of significant benefit to the rest of the world,” and merit its inclusion at the online event as an observer.
“Allowing for some sort of meaningful participation would seem to be the minimum that the WHO could do,” US Permanent Representative to the European Office of the UN Andrew Bremberg said of Taiwan on Friday.
In Beijing on Friday, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) said that some countries that were insisting on “Taiwan-related proposals” were doing so only to “politicize health issues.”
“They pursue their own political interests at the cost of ‘kidnapping’ the World Health Assembly and damaging global anti-epidemic cooperation,” Zhao said.
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