TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
G20 health ambitions: Financial commitment, united competence
The second Health Working Group has to be more progressive in terms of discussing, debating and agreeing on common solutions to face future pandemics.
Change Size
Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin opens the G20's Health Working Group meeting in Yogayakarta on March 28. (Health Ministry/Health Ministry)
As the Group of 20 second Health Working Group commences today, the question is not whether the 20 biggest economies can end this pandemic, but whether we have learned our shortcomings in the more than two years of responding to this devastating test and whether we can do something about them.
Today, the 20 largest economies in the world will again make their marks in the history of the global health transformation. In the next three days, G20 member states will agree upon a giant step to initiate a long journey to a better response to future pandemics.
Earlier in March, the first working group in Yogyakarta managed to find ways to agree on universal verifiers for vaccine certificates and common basic health protocols required to allow people to travel around the world again — helping to revive global mobility.
Indonesia also relayed this consensus to the World Health Assembly, which was held a few weeks ago at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, when it chaired one of the sessions.
One agenda item has been checked off, but there are a few more to go.
The next meeting of public health leaders of the G20 countries will focus on leveraging everything we have and further expanding our capacity to become better in responding to future pandemics. This gathering will build a stronger case to link health with knowledge management, financing mechanisms and paying greater attention to the ecosystem.
The health leaders will work together to find ways to strengthen global health architecture, particularly in building a better system of identifying public health emergencies of international concern. They will also continue to work on coordinating health protocols across the globe and will further discuss expanding access to knowledge linked to pandemic response, such as leveraging the global science initiative and primary sources that provide open access to genomic data on influenza viruses and the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
