 It is a great pleasure for me to be with you once again. I must say and to meet at least virtually so many friends and colleagues at the summit. My name is Thomas Selner. I'm a Swiss medical doctor and lawyer and have had the privilege to be involved in patient safety for many years, be it in Switzerland, be it at the World Health Organization and finally and certainly not last but not least at the patient safety movement with you. Very glad to be back here with you today. I will be speaking about the topic that hold us hostage over the last two years. And unfortunately, I must say probably even for another couple of months, at least the pandemic of the corona virus. Let me start first by saying, let's never forget how much suffering, long-term disease and death this virus has brought our many of our families, communities and to the world. It is a painful moment for many, many of you, probably on this meeting. But let's also be thankful for all those who have committed their energy and all their work to fight against this virus. And we all appreciate what that meant for all the healthcare workers, for the families and we're so grateful for that. What I will do in the next minute is actually focus on something we're probably not even thinking too much about it, namely the question of how much innovation has actually this pandemic also created for our system locally but also globally. And I will address three issues briefly, namely what innovations do I see that happened close to the patients and close to their families? Secondly, innovations that happened in the political sphere to better fight the current pandemic and finally innovations to give the general population the public a possibility to engage in creating a safer world. But before going into this, let me just mention what challenges as a community, but also as government and I worked a lot in this context with the Swiss governments, what challenges were we faced with? I think there were particularly five we need to look into, A, we were constantly in a race against the time, in a race against the virus. So speed of our action was always a very important part of what we had to do. The second thing is how do we develop safe answers when we want to be fast, when we need to be fast? And so the question of speed versus safety has always been at our mind. Thirdly, the question of solidarity, global solidarity overcoming global split is actually a very important issue. We saw the world actually split in two ways, West versus East, the Western world versus China to some extent, but more importantly, and for today, the split between the North and the South and those who have the means and those who didn't have them. Of course, we needed to collaborate in this pandemic and we need to continue to do so. This is true, of course, for the medical field, but it is also between governments and the industry. It's between the industry and regulators, et cetera. So there is a lot of cooperation which is needed. And last point, a huge challenge is really the communication information in something we call the infodemic that happened in this pandemic. So let me first start with the question of innovation close to patients and their families and I will address three points there. Of course, and we need to start with that, is really the question, how much innovation went into producing a vaccine in record times? It is probably really something we haven't seen before and that we need to appreciate even in the future. Let's rethink that the virus showed up in December 2019 and already on January 5th of 2020, the Chinese and the Chinese scientists actually published the genome of the virus. And on January 10, already it was on the internet and everybody could use this genome to work on vaccines. In the US, Moderna with the support of Fauci and the government started working end of January on the vaccine and it took only a couple of months until the first vaccine was on the market and it's an amazing date, December 8th. The first person was vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine and 90 year old woman in the UK. December 14th, the first American was vaccinated also. All these innovations and already the product per se and the technology used are huge innovations but we should not forget and many people are not so much aware of that. Two parallel innovations actually went along which are process innovations. For the first time, the companies with the support of the regulators actually didn't go through the regular process of clinical phase one, phase two, phase three in developing the vaccines but actually had the processes in parallel. So they were making actually phase two and phase three in parallel to save time and the regulator accepted that as a procedure to speed up. The second thing a number of companies did and that's surprising too. They actually produced millions of doses of vaccine before they had the license to do so and the regular approval. Just with the risk if there was no approval they would have had to dismiss it or to dump all these vaccines but all of that help that we were on the market close to the patients with new vaccines very in a very short time. An amazing story of success and innovation. A second point I want to address and again not too many people are actually aware of that. WHO estimates that more than 1.3 million, 1.3 million people die every year because of unsafe injection practices. Of course, most of these people live in high low income countries in Africa and this makes that we need to invest in better injection possibilities. And again here we are doing new steps forward which seem to be progressing rapidly. We have actually now one way syringes coming and even self-injecting syringes soon on the market also for the pandemic. The last one I want to address is quickly is really the question of the IT digital technologies and the pandemic. Telemedicine has seen a really push through the pandemic and I think that is something we really need to welcome. And I'm so glad that not only helps when it comes interacting patients with their doctors, etc. But as a side effect and that has a mental health effect it helps children to connect with other children and keep them connected. And that all is actually very important. Next item I want to address is the question of what innovations did we see in the political sphere? I just mentioned three of them. One is and the first one is the Act A initiative generated by the G20 member states or members and they actually promised in early 2020 that they would collect the money, the resources needed to reach something like 70% of vaccination coverage in low and middle income countries by September 22 to testing rates of 100 by 100,000 inhabitants per day, 120 million treatments in low income countries and protecting 2.7 million healthcare workers. These plans are fabulous. Unfortunately, and I only have the data till February of this year from the more than 16 billion dollars needed to fund this only 1.1 billion so far has been sent and given and we need to rush and bring more money in. And I know that the countries are working on it but we are far from then. So it's about let's not only talk but let's also work the instrument, the innovation that platform is here but the results are not yet. The same is very much true for the COVAX initiative which is a platform organized by different UN organizations and the idea behind COVAX is actually that doses for at least 20% of the population in a country are given through COVAX. So far COVAX has actually shipped over 1 billion doses to 144 countries. That's good but is far from what we need. And I again see here a couple of difficulties namely that high income countries are not as generous as they should be offering the doses they could give to low income countries. Secondly, and that's the part we are working right now low and middle income countries must better prepare the vaccination campaigns. Many of them are just simply not ready to accept the dosages and to start with broad campaigns and we need to innovate and help them innovate also in that fine. And finally, and that's unfortunately quite often the case in UN organizations, COVAX seems to be a very slow moving target on the organization. Last point on this innovation in the political sphere is the Berlin hop that WHO created in order to have more data, better data, more and better analytics and better decisions when it comes to preparing for pandemics. Unfortunately, and that's surprising in the world we're living, the databases for the governments to prepare for pandemics but also to fight pandemics is low. And the data are not actually secured and we need to work on that and we don't see yet the results of this hop but let's all work on this it's a very important issue to be really science-based when it comes to response. This brings me to the last of my points and that's really the innovations we made or could make in the past months to enable the public to engage in creating a safer world. One is that we created and I was part of that funding campaigns to mobilize campaigns to mobilize money for vaccination. One is to go give one campaign which actually ask individuals to give $7 for the vaccination of vaccines and the goal was to get 50 million people to give $7. We are not yet there but we did make major progress in collaborating actually with a fabulous organization, Global Citizens which organized a couple of concerts one of which may eight where they actually helped raising more than $300 million for COVID vaccines which gives something like 20 million additional COVID vaccines. Many prominent people like Prince Harris and Megan other artists have actually helped and I think we are here seeing a new movement of supporting which is fabulous. What we also saw and we need to fight more is misinformation, fake news and there is a very new initiative by the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Medicine in the US to encourage digital platform actually to apply principles for identifying credible sources of health. I would invite you all to look at this paper and to see how you can actually spread in your organizations the way how to implement a more credible sources and get rid of the fake news is. And last but not least, let me with some pride address the question of the WHO foundation. We actually created this foundation in May, 2020 because WHO lacks sufficient resources to fill its mandate. And what we want to do and are about to do is really to invite philanthropists, foundation, business and also individuals to support the mission of WHO, promote health, keep the world safe and serve the most vulnerable. Right now, apart from the pandemic, we're also, of course, trying to support the people in the Ukraine, the health system in Ukraine to come at grace with a very, very difficult situation they're in. Let me finish with coming back and with a very personal evaluation of the how good we are with the challenges we set we want to address. I think we can be happy and proud when it comes to the speed of our reaction we have done well in that. Safety so far as we can see it, patient safety has been up except that some of the operations and other things had to be delayed, et cetera. On a global level, we must say we are pretty good here. Finally, the question of cooperation, so-so information I would say there is much more to do. And unfortunately, once again, when it comes to solidarity, I would say we have not done the job and we need to do more and that's what I think we all need to work on in the next couple of months. Having said that, thank you so much for your attention. I hope that these couple of ideas brought you nevertheless a little bit. How much also positive impact this pandemic had so far and that eventually we will come out of this pandemic also in that respect with some positive new steps into a safer future. Thank you so much.