 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello everyone and welcome to a new issue of the People's Health Dispatch. Today we are here with Garga from the People's Health Movement Secretariat. Garga has been part of a team following the recent meeting of the WHO's Executive Board at the end of January. So the WHO as the UN's health agency meets twice a year. It meets once in January or February where when it's the Executive Board first takes up some of the agenda points that are then reflected during the World Health Assembly usually held in May. And so this time the EB met after two years since the WHO has declared COVID-19 a public health emergency. And so to begin with Garga I was wondering if you could reflect on that point what were the topics taken up by the EB and how did it reflect on two years of the pandemic. Thanks Anna. First I'll start with the issues around health emergency and the COVID issues because as you have already rightly said it's the second year from the time the pandemic has been I mean COVID has been declared as a public health emergency. And what we see that even after two years what we face is not at the start you know two years back it was an issue of science where we really did not know much about the virus we did not know much about how to deal with it what sort of medicines will require what sort of vaccines we require. But two years later the progress as far as scientifically is concerned has gone ahead very well. And you'll see that you know despite all the progress what we face now is a gross inequity in the way these products of science have been distributed. And in these two years we have seen countries you know have different waves of the COVID pandemic we had the variants as we already know there was a delta variant at the latest one Omicron. So this meeting was also happening in the backdrop of Omicron variant and the related surge in cases across the world. But it looks like there is very little that we have progressed because there are populations which are taking three doses on one I mean they're taking booster doses on one side and there are populations which are yet to get even first dose. What is the role of WHO in this is the failure of actually taking the ownership of this manufacturing and distribution. As you might know the coordination of manufacturing of building together these medical products was kind of taken out of WHO in the form of a large multi-stakeholder or we can call it a public-private partnership known as ACT accelerator. And in that in particular there is something known as Covax facility which was looking after you know the vaccine productions and distributions across the world. And there has been this spectacular failure which after you know after two years there is a complete failure of these public-private partnerships in you know rising up to the occasion. And why does this happen is at the core problem is the WHO over a period of time has become a very weak agency and like every other United Nations organization it has been having fund cuts, it has been having you know issues of trying to delegitimize WHO in different ways of let us say saying that WHO might be inefficient and so on and so forth. And this also got exaggerated with Trump trying to pull out of WHO and only last year did the US administration come back into WHO. I mean they really did not leave but the decision was taken to not leave. So you have in this context a very weak WHO and as you the one of the core issues or the core works of WHO is to coordinate these health emergencies and you know these global health emergencies which are affecting multiple countries and coordinate them and get you know policies across that help each other. But what we see here is also the learnings of the pandemic are being taken in a different way. And so actually strengthening the WHO and also the learnings of the pandemic which are basically that we really need a public sector and you know public health which is provided by the governments. You know we are seeing this across the world just because a country spends a lot on health doesn't really mean it was able to deal with the emergency well a clear example is the United States which has been failing miserably on various fronts. So it is in this context that this is happening. But what is happening is not just a few countries but many countries have not been using this these learnings from the pandemic to strengthen the process of a multilateral or a UN led agency like WHO but they are weakening. How they are weakening it is you know there is this fragmentation of decision making that is happening. So one of those in particular in this EB was the you know proposal by Austria where they wanted a standing committee on pandemic emergency preparedness and response. So what you know and there are many such committees actually you open the agenda or the you know follow the executive board of the World Health Assembly even for someone like me who follows it on a regular basis so confusing with so many parallel committees running and so on. What you increasingly see is in the name of efficiency and doing it better. A typical corporate playbook is being employed here where things are being fragmented so much that no single person or no single agency can be confident of proposing real suggestions or making real changes. And this in particular in the context of a health emergency in the future will be devastating because you can't have 10 different committees within WHO doing 10 different things and not just in WHO there are multiple smaller organizations like World Bank and CEPI and so on so forth who follow and have their own you know influence on these issues. So we are looking at basically a corporatized multiple corporations philanthropies getting into health emergencies and the governance of it. Okay and of course what we have seen over the past two years I think also it reflects to what you just said is that the WHO had a much more prominent role in the media since the pandemic started and this has had a lot to do with what the director general Tedros has been doing and if I'm not mistaken this is the year when Tedros first term is about to end so has the EB been discussing that as well? Yes so Dr Tedros I mean over the last few years because of the interest on world health organizations it's director general you know Tedros has become a very common name even beyond the health circles. And he's coming to end of his first term which has been to an extent a successful one as far as you know the mainstream understanding is concerned because you have the agency dealing with a pandemic which or a health emergency of such a scale that it hasn't seen from the day of its formation. So on one side you have the director general or the leadership actually trying to pull through the pandemic but how effective has the leadership been is not a single issue of leadership alone it's also the organization itself becoming weak and it's got a lot to do with the kind of funding it has been getting. I'll go into that point of funding in a while but about the leadership so usually you know there I mean usually second term is let's say a given until and unless something really has gone wrong in the world health organization but here we don't see and it looks like all the countries were very very much satisfied with the leadership of Tedros and it looks like I mean the executive board proposed his name already as the next director which will be going to the world health assembly in May and formally he will go on to his second term. So as far as Tedros is concerned it's been a successful term for him but the structural issues still remain you know the structural issues of funding the structural issues of a VWHO and so on remain and one thing on a different note is also that except Ethiopia which is the actual country that he was coming him no one had comments against him. So this was coming from some of the internal conflict so we are looking at a very strange situation where the country is not supporting him where he comes from but rest of the world is and it's got to do with some of the internal politics which is very complex for us to understand but he will be going through for his next term and coming to the issue of VWHO and its financing. So for those who might on those you might not know VWHO actually gets quality funding which is like core funding we call it as assessed it is good quality funds which actually allows the world health organization like any other UN agency to work on what are the important things of the day in the context of health and global health and so on. But then we have another type of funding which basically is tied funding and we call it as voluntary funding where you can the donor country or donor agency can basically say you know I want you to work on XYZ. So what you see is despite the pandemic you actually don't see a great increase in funding for VWHO for the next two years like the VWHO funds are decided once every two years and the last two years which is 2020 and 2021 we actually saw around 10 billion dollars come in for VWHO most of it going of course for COVID related work that's that was very important and what we were thinking was that you know because of the health emergency the future also VWHO will get much needed funds. However we see that the projections seem to be around six billion dollars there has been a discussion in the last two years which has become part of a larger working group which has been that proposed by Germany and others that we need to increase the funding financing for the world health organization over a period of time and for this from last one year we have been having a working group that is looking at sustainable financing but the irony I mean the discussion was about how we bring up the and I was like I was telling the funds are basically tied and untied funds and these untied funds are what are the good quality funds and this committee was trying to make countries agree that they will actually give at least half of VWHO's funding as untied and quality funds and it looks like most of the countries mainly from the west and also a few from the global south were not really ready to support this proposal that we want to increase quality funds towards the world health organization. So what does what does this mean for the organization is that the organization then goes and makes ties with agencies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and different philanthropies and corporates who when they fund something have a very different understanding of health and they see it more as an issue of the market rather than from the angle of rights. I mean one of the classical examples is Bill Gates saying that you know I don't believe that we should wave off intellectual property on the medical products like vaccines because the global south really doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to make their own vaccines and this is also something that how does this external funding from these agencies work on VWHO's technical work and also the policy suggestions it is going to give. So we as people's health movement have been worried over the past many years that dependence on these external funds and the private sector the corporates is going to weaken the realistic suggestions that a world health organization should give which should be cutting across profits and putting people's lives over profits and not go into the understanding the trade they need to kind of also bother about the trade and profits of the corporates. So that's kind of a tricky thing we are facing and we hope that the countries come back to financing WHOD quickly. Thank you Gargaya. I think this has been quite a complete summary of the main points of the EB. Of course there have been other topics taken up which we hope that we will be elaborating upon in the next issues of people's health dispatch so keep following us to get more information on those and that's our wrap I think. Thanks.