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| ANI Photo | G7 health agenda perfectly aligned with India’s G20 Presidency priorities: Mandaviya |
Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya highlighted the significant impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on global health infrastructure, emphasizing the need for enhanced robustness, inclusivity, and responsiveness while maintaining the central role of the World Health Organization (WHO). The minister was addressing the G7 Health Ministerial meeting on Global Health Architecture in Nagasaki, Japan on Saturday.
The meeting was held to discuss global health challenges and ways to ensure preparedness, prevention and response to future health emergencies among health ministers of G7 countries.
Rajya Sabha MP, Shri Ramdas Mandaviya, said, “In managing any health emergency, a country’s national health system is heavily reliant on the global health system.”
Dr Mandaviya emphasized the importance of unified and collaborative efforts to address the difficulties faced by the world and stressed the need for global health security with a particular emphasis on promoting health equity.
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| Nagasaki: Union Health Minister Mansukh L Mandaviya meets Health Minister of Indonesia Budi G. Sadikin on the sidelines of the G7 Health Ministers’ meeting, in Nagasaki, Japan, Saturday, May 13, 2023. |
He noted that while multiple global efforts are underway, there is a need to ensure the harmonization of these ongoing initiatives. He appreciated that the health agendas under the G20 India Presidency and the G7 Japan Presidency are perfectly aligned. He added that these have collectively prioritized health emergency preparedness, access to medical countermeasures and digital health to achieve universal health coverage and foster innovation.
Mandaviya highlighted the importance of digital solutions and the utilization of technology in ensuring continuity of care amidst the numerous challenges posed by the pandemic. He emphasized that these solutions can help in tackling the health crisis and provide ongoing care to those affected. Furthermore, he noted that the government has taken proactive steps to ensure that digital health services are accessible and affordable for all. He concluded by stressing the need for all stakeholders to come together to develop and implement digital solutions to ensure that healthcare services are not interrupted during this critical time.
He stated that “bridging the digital divide through the promotion of digital public goods to support health service delivery is critical to ensure that the fruits of technology are made available to all and to aid and augment health response capacities”.
On India’s G20 Presidency, Minister of State for Shipping, Mansukh Mandaviya, informed that priority has been given towards building consensus for converging global efforts to address any health emergencies and ensure the availability of medical countermeasures to all the countries during such emergencies, with a particular focus on both affordability and equitable availability.
He voiced his concern about the high level of global inequity in access to medical countermeasures, noting that even after over two years since the Covid-19 vaccination program was launched in December 2020, only 34% of the population in low-and-middle-income countries had been vaccinated, compared to 73% in high-income countries as of April 2023.
