 Distinguished guests, Deputy Director Hader, Professor Hart, Ms. Bill Vincent, and friends. Has anyone lost their phone? We have a few with Lucy O'Hare just outside the front room there. No, seriously, we've got some lost phones. I'm so pleased to welcome you back to our final plenary and closing ceremony. It's been an incredible four days for me anyway, and I sincerely hope for you. It's remarkably refreshing to be in such a beautiful environment with such a relatively progressive drug policy. And I think that that feels like a burden off many of our shoulders. We're so proud and we welcome the Mayor of Porto's announcement of the opening of a mobile supervised injection site in Porto. And we wish civil society luck pushing and calling for that implementation. We are pleased to have such incredible interest and participation from local and national government at this conference. And delighted again that the Portuguese government announced their pledge to the Global Fund on Monday, tripling their previous commitment to addressing AIDS, TB and malaria in low and middle income countries. While we are on this Portuguese high, pun intended, it is worth mentioning that bids are open for our next conference. Our conference takes place every two years, and we look to local NGOs to express their interest in hosting the conference. In particular, it's important for us that bringing the international community together can have some sort of useful local impact. That the international tension is useful to boost advocacy or in some way it helps us to move our work forward. And there's more information on our website about that. Our first speaker, Dr. Shannon Haider was announced as the new Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS and Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations in February this year. Prior to this role, she was Director of the Division of Global HIV and TB at the US Center for Disease Control and led the HIV response in the District of Columbia while serving as Senior Deputy Director of HIV and AIDS, Hepatitis, STD and TB Administration. Shannon just got off a flight from Bangkok. We are so, so pleased to welcome her here. So please give her a warm round of applause. Well, good afternoon. Good afternoon. I am thrilled to see such an amazing crowd on the last day of what I've seen has been an incredibly intense, glorious conference on a beautiful setting with a beautiful weather outside. So thank you all for being here to really let us close out in style, right? I'm really thrilled to be here representing UNAIDS. As mentioned, I'm pretty new to UNAIDS about 30 days. But I'm really, really excited to be here with you all today. Thank you to Harm Reduction International as a long-standing key partner to UNAIDS and for inviting us to participate, not just throughout the week, but also here in the closing. I was asked to share a little bit about what is my personal background with harm reduction. Because I had mentioned that I'm a true believer that moments in time can be transformative, whether it's creating or seizing those moments at local level, trying to make sure that we can build up those small moments into some global moments as well. When I had first moved, I'm American, I had first moved to Washington, D.C., our nation's capital in 2007. And after living there a little bit, I did what any geeky HIV doctor does in the middle of a Friday night and started Googling what's going on with HIV in D.C. And I found out that we had a horrific epidemic in Washington, D.C. in 2007. About 5% of the adult population was already living with HIV, and about half of them didn't know about it. People were still dying of AIDS, babies were still getting infected. And as it turned out, with our multifaceted epidemic, about 20% of the people living with HIV were people who injected drugs, turned out that as the district, not a state in the United States, we had been prohibited from using local district tax dollars to implement harm reduction and needle exchange programs because our national government had control over the district and said, no, you can't. So I ended up quitting the job I had and I went to work for Washington, D.C., local government for a young feisty mayor who said, you know, if you can show me the evidence that's going to work, we'll get behind you and do it. And I was lucky enough to arrive at a moment in time where three months after I started, based on 10 years of work by advocates in civil society and passionate committed people, we got permission for the very first time to use our own Washington, D.C., local tax dollars to implement needle exchange and harm reduction programs. And you know, the day after that was signed into law, we got $2 million out the door. We started comprehensive harm reduction and needle exchange programs. We were lucky because we had really committed providers, civil society, and a handful of community law enforcement who said, we want something else for the people in our communities that's going to serve them better. And within three years, oh, actually, within the first year, we had gotten 300,000 needles off the street. We had provided a whole different range of comprehensive harm reduction and needle exchange services. We started overdose prevention programs and those are going on today. So I know there can be these little moments in time. We're suddenly, when we all work together, everything can change. So today, I really do want to state and restate up front hopefully things that you've heard before. At UNAIDS, we are committed to decriminalization of personal use of drugs and full access to harm reduction and zero discrimination towards people who use drugs. And this is to save lives, to prevent HIV and other infections, to improve overall health and social outcomes. And I bring greetings from our UNAIDS Executive Director, Michelle C. D. Bay. And let me assure you, he has been a tireless voice amongst U.N. and other world leaders to state repeatedly that business, as usual, is getting us nowhere. The war on drugs is, in effect, a war on people and it's not working. That people are left behind because of prejudice, discrimination, poverty, and bad laws that in spite of the fact that we know that approaches that prioritize people's health and human rights work, they are not happening at the scale and with the breadth we need, that policies that criminalize and marginalize people who inject drugs are failing to reduce new HIV infections. And it bears repeating over and over, as Kofi Annan has said, drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrong government policies have destroyed many more. So we need people-centered, right? Still happening. So we need people-centered, evidence-based interventions that will help people, which bring people who use drugs out of the shadows to access services, which are focused on the health and rights of each individual. And as we in this room know, and I'm sorry it has to be said, but I'm going to say it just in celebration of the work that's been done this week, that harm reduction works. There's no question about it. And countries like Portugal who've adopted and implemented comprehensive harm reduction policies and stopped prosecuting people for personal use of drugs, have seen reductions in HIV among people who inject drugs. And at UN AIDS, I want to make sure everybody here knows we are committed to partnering with community and civil society. The history of the AIDS epidemic has shown us time and time again that there is no successful HIV response without working together with the communities most affected. Civil society and community-based organizations are on our UN AIDS board. And in our board and through our work, we support civil society and communities of people who use drugs as key partners in the HIV response. And we consult with community on key policy and technical issues, including, as we'll talk a little bit more, universal health coverage, community-led responses, and social enablers. And it's a good time to, you know, really recognize that we've had a few positive steps and declarations within the UN at global level recently. In March 2019, at the Commission on Narcotics and Drugs, UN AIDS launched its report on health rights and drugs, harm reduction decriminalization, and zero discrimination for people who use drugs. And the report's key message is that the current approach to drugs based on criminalization doesn't work and that rights and health-based approaches are urgently needed. Also in 2019, the Chief Executives Board of the UN, representing 31 UN agencies, adopted a common position on drug policy that endorses decriminalization of possession and use and clearly supports harm reduction. And that will help us jointly work together to make sure people who use drugs are not left behind in ending AIDS and beyond. And just as a reminder, in the 2016 UN General Assembly Political Declaration to End AIDS by 2030, all UN member countries committed to removing punitive laws that create barriers to accessing HIV services, and that includes laws criminalizing drug use and possession for personal use. But we must be honest, despite these global commitments, we have far to go. We have far to go in actualizing these commitments at national and local levels. And in fact, in some cases, in some places, we're going backwards. So the urgency to go forward and to go forward faster is clear. Urgency. We are failing to meet our commitments to reduce HIV among people who use drugs. The world is missing its target set to reduce HIV transmission among people who inject drugs. And at a time when overall rates of new HIV infections across the globe are going down, HIV rates among people who use drugs are rising. And this is, again, despite the fact that we know that harm reduction works, that countries that have introduced harm reduction and decriminalization have greatly reduced HIV linked to drug injection. But we know why this is. We know that harm reduction coverage is insufficient, that 99% of people who use drugs do not have full access to adequate services. We know that funding is insufficient and relies heavily on external donors. I think our estimate is almost three quarters of the spending on HIV services for people who use drugs was financed by external donors. And we've seen that access to quality of and harm reduction programs is negatively affected by the transition of some of these external funds to domestic funding, especially in middle income countries, which are home to the majority of people living with HIV who use drugs. It's urgent to respond because the space for civil society is shrinking. Funding for civil society organizations has declined since peaking in about 2012 or 2013, and both political and administrative barriers impede full access to funding for civil society and community-led responses. So given that, what are the opportunities and how do we even lift up some new opportunities that might not be as immediate as some that we've been working on? One area is we can place the agenda of these evidence-based, people-centered approaches to drug use into the larger context of the sustainable development goals or the SDGs that all UN member states have signed on to. And sometimes this takes, you know, starting some complex discussions with folks who are not from the health or human rights arena. Discussions with experts and leaders that recognize that illicit drug trade fuels instability. Drug traffickers can exploit widespread poverty and corruption undermining governance, social, and economic development in the rule of law. But with all that, we must be realistic and we must accept that we will never live in a drug-free world. We cannot end the AIDS epidemic if we do not end it among people who inject drugs. So instead of our current policies, we need to bring folks from beyond the health and human rights arenas into our very first let us do no harm approach. Let us put people above politics and let us be pragmatic. It's possible by recognizing that these drug use and drug trade takes place in a broader development and security context to also recognize and respond when new storms of risk are really increasing. I think recently in Sahel in Africa, we've seen the wider consumption of drugs, cheaper drug prices, a huge youth population that is disenfranchised and without hope and with poor job prospects. And it's a perfect storm for serious drug problems and serious HIV problems in the region. Recognition of this context helped drive the launch of a model drug law for West Africa. Now that's taking us in the right direction because it follows science and evidence and human rights. But it doesn't go far enough because we know there are major gaps and still most of the work left to do for implementation and services and on the ground progress. But within the SDGs, we're also having a lot of conversations about universal health coverage, UHC. And as we implement the sustainable development goals and universal health coverage, harm reduction must be an integral component of that. Financing and components of UHC must cover harm reduction, overdose prevention, medication-assisted therapies, PrEP, and include other services that might coexist like mental health services. We at UN AIDS will fight for civil society to have a seat at the table at the UHC tables for co-designing these packages, for community monitoring of implementation, and as providers of critical services. And finally, when it comes to ending AIDS by 2030 and the 2016 Political Declaration about it, I wanted to highlight a couple of pertinent commitments that don't always get as much coverage or as much advertisement, included in that declaration are two things. One thing that says we will ensure that at least 30% of all service delivery is community-led by 2030, and that we will ensure that at least 6% of HIV resources are allocated for socially-enabling activities, including advocacy, community and political mobilization, community monitoring, public communications, outreach programs, rapid testing, as well as human rights programs, such as law and policy reform, stigma, and discrimination reduction. Right? The challenge is there's not a whole lot of agreement on what community-led programs are or what social neighbors really look like. And so we at UN AIDS are now also working on developing consensus and convening around the definitions of community-led responses and social enablers so that we can in fact drive accountability and true progress on these commitments. So I just want to wrap with a few things, mostly saying thank you. Thank you for giving, we at UN AIDS, the opportunity to be with you here today and for the last few days, and to reiterate our commitment to putting people above politics. Thank you for the work you're doing every day to fight for the health and dignity of people across our world. We truly want to hear from you. We've got multiple levels of technical experts and advocates from country-level to Geneva, all over, and we really do want to hear your ideas on how we can work best collectively to support a safe and respected place for civil society at the policy and decision-making tables so that again, evidence and experience can guide our effective response. We will work with the Global Fund for replenishment of resources and policies to support that civil society space and to advocate for governments to adopt expanded social contracting approaches. And we take seriously our responsibility to work jointly with our UN partners and countries and communities to ensure that people who use drugs are not left behind. That we all have a collective responsibility to fulfill our commitments to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, achieve the SDGs, and champion approaches that put people at the center and restore dignity at all. Thank you for your lessons and your commitment. And I think we can close out this session with a lot of energy. So thank you. Thank you so much. It's so exciting to have this UN AIDS commitment and this leadership direct from you.