The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, assured yesterday, during the closing of the High Level Meeting of the GAP (Global Action Plan against COVID-19), that global health will be one of the priorities of the next Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU, which will take place in the second half of 2023.
“Spain has a clear determination and leadership in the field of global health,” the minister told those attending the event, which brought together in Madrid senior representatives from 35 countries – with a special delegation from the United States, the main promoter of the initiative – and from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), UNICEF, the Red Cross, the Global Network for Academic Public Health (GNAPH), the Spanish Medicines Agency, the European Commission and ISGlobal.
The meeting, which began on Tuesday and concluded yesterday, has served to prepare the ministerial meeting convened by the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, for the United Nations week in New York, at the end of September, in which Spain will co-host with the Government of the United States, Bangladesh and Botswana. In addition to Albares, the meeting was attended by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau, and the Secretary of State for International Cooperation, Pilar Cancela Rodríguez.
As an example of this commitment, Albares continued, Spain is leading the fourth line of effort in the Global Action Plan: support for health workers. According to Foreign Affairs, the shortage of health workers is the biggest problem since the pandemic began. Therefore, the minister called yesterday for “all international health initiatives to make the necessary investments to support our health workers.”
With regard to the vaccines against COVID, Albares recalled that Spain is the fifth largest donor worldwide and the second largest donor to Latin America and highlighted the importance of the first 100% Spanish and 100% European vaccine, HIPRA, which was presented during the meeting in Madrid and which is currently in the process of continuous review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), a necessary step to authorize its commercialization.
Albares also valued the agreement reached last November with C-TAP (Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program) “to manufacture and market worldwide, patent-free, a serological test for COVID-19”, developed in Spain by the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Superior Center for Scientific Research) and the Spanish company Immunostep, and celebrated the fact that the Madrid meeting served to create the Intermediary Financial Fund for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPR), of which Spain is a founding partner. “We want it to be a central piece of the new global health architecture, in which WHO will play a fundamental role,” he said.
The Global Action Plan (GAP) was created to follow up on the Global Summit on Covid-19: Ending the Pandemic and Rebuilding a Better Reality, convened by the United States in September 2021 and attended, at the highest level, by a hundred countries, as well as representatives of international organizations, NGOs and the private sector in the field of global health. The GAP was conceived with the aim of joining forces and improving international coordination to collectively overcome the pandemic by working along six “Lines of Effort”: vaccinate to protect the world’s population, strengthen the resilience of the supply chain, fight against misinformation, support health workers, guarantee medical treatment and strengthen the Global Health architecture.
