Context: At the close of the Global Health Summit, the G20 leaders on May 21 issued a joint declaration aimed at coordinating worldwide efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a press release, the G20 leaders noted that the pandemic continues to be a global health and socio-economic crisis, with disproportionate direct and indirect effects on the most vulnerable as well as healthcare workers. They added that the pandemic will not be over until all countries are able to bring the disease under control and therefore, “large-scale, global, safe, effective and equitable vaccination in combination with appropriate other public health measures remains our top priority”. 

• In this edition of Big Picture we analyse the Global Health Summit and the G20 Leaders' Rome Declaration. 

About Global Health Summit 2021

• Global Health Summit was organised by Italy in its role as president of the G20 in partnership with the European Commission.
• Purpose: The summit seeks to empower and enable stakeholders to address the challenges in the third sustainable development goal(SDG) of Health and Wellbeing for all.

Rome Declaration

• The Rome Declaration was adopted at the Global Health Summit 2021.
• Principles: The declaration is made up of 16 mutually agreed principles. These principles aim at guiding joint action to prevent future health crises and to build a safer, fairer and more equitable and sustainable world.

Key Features of the Rome Declaration

• Support and enhance the existing multilateral health architecture.
• Promote the multilateral trading system and global supply chains related to Health emergencies,
• Enable equitable, affordable, timely global access to high-quality, safe, effective prevention, detection and response tools.
• Support low and middle-income countries to build expertise and develop local and regional manufacturing capacities for tools.
• Facilitate data sharing, capacity building, licensing agreements among stakeholders. Further, it aims to facilitate voluntary technology and know-how transfers on mutually agreed terms.

Invest in the worldwide health and care workforce

• To increase the effectiveness of preparedness and response measures by promoting inclusive dialogue with local communities,
• To seek to ensure the effectiveness of financing mechanisms.

Road Ahead

• The G20 is making the right kind of noises on patent waivers and other issues but have not acted very productively. IPR is a big concern but a bigger issue is the availability of raw materials that are required fot the production of vaccines, we have to work with like minded partners to get the required raw materials, resilient supply chains will also have to be created to move away from China.
• We also have to take note of the fact that the virus is mutating at an alarming rate so the present vaccines may not always work. They have to be tweaked every now and then. At current levels we need around $12 billion doses of vaccines and my need about 5 billion more booster doses. So the virus isn't going anywhere, we need global cooperation and need to come together as one to defeat the pandemic.