The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, offered yesterday Spain’s leadership in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in two priority regions for Spanish Cooperation, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Sahel.
Albares participated yesterday in a ministerial meeting convened by the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, to analyze the Global Action Plan for the fight against COVID-19. The meeting, the second at ministerial level, was attended by his counterparts from Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Senegal and Saudi Arabia, as well as the European Commission’s Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, and representatives from the African Union and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Australia, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
During the discussions, the participants addressed six priority lines of action corresponding to the Global Action Plan: increasing vaccination, strengthening the supply chain, providing accurate and truthful information on vaccines, supporting the safety and training of health workers, reinforcing the global health architecture and other non-vaccine therapeutic actions.
During his speech, Albares reported that Spain has been able to combine “a high percentage of vaccination of its own population” with the fact that it is “one of the main donors of vaccines. Ninety percent of Spanish donations have been made through the COVAX mechanism, making Spain its fifth largest contributor, with more than 50 million doses sent. Spain is also the second largest donor of vaccines in Latin America and has also distributed doses in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Southern Neighborhood and Asia. Along the same lines, he continued, access to vaccination has been facilitated in humanitarian contexts, as in the recent operation in favor of Afghan refugees in Iran.
However, Albares warned, “it is not only necessary to increase the distribution of vaccines, but also to strengthen national health systems” and reform the system of global health governance, also reinforcing the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO) to prevent future pandemics.
In addition, the Foreign Minister offered Spain’s leadership in coordinating the donor response to COVID-19 in two lines of action – the fight against disinformation and support for health workers – and in two geographical regions: Latin America and the Caribbean and the Sahel. These are two priority regions for Spanish Cooperation in which Spain has significant previous experience and a wide institutional deployment and works in close coordination with Team Europe, as well as with local counterparts. To work in these two areas, Spain also has the global health program COVID-19 recently launched by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) in twelve priority countries.
