 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. We are standing here in the chilly weather of Geneva in front of the headquarters of World Health Organization. The WHO is holding its 152nd Executive vote meeting this week. Hundreds of governments, activists and other stakeholders have gathered in the city to discuss and deliberate upon some of the most important issues that impact health of the common people of the world, be it social determinants of health or polio or disability and rehabilitation, universal health coverage and many others. We have many experts with us today who have been following these issues and many more for a long time and they will take us through what to expect and what should be done. Looking at the agenda of the 152nd Executive Board of the WHO, in the year of the Jubilee of the 75th anniversary of the existence of the WHO, one would expect something more ambitious, something that recognizes the many lessons learned from the three years of the pandemic. Unfortunately, we are confronted with an agenda that is structured according to a sort of a pre-pandemic time. Of course, there is an exuberant role of the emergency, role of the emergency function and all this pandemic prevention, preparedness and response issues that are very prominent in the agenda. But what we notice is the exactly the same technical way of looking at health, the subtly the same disease-focused glands on health which technicalize the problem rather than making the political issue that it is. And this is a bit of a disappointing recognition that WHO does not seem to have learned the many pedagogical lessons that COVID-19 has told the organization, including, for example, all the environmental, the planetary health aspects of the problem of facing the diseases of the future. So this year the EB is considering a report that updates the executive board on progress towards achieving targets on UHC. Think should definitely not stay the same because what the report is saying is that countries, member states are not on track to achieve the UHC target set out under the SDGs. And this partly is due to COVID-19, but it's also partly due to the financing centric approach to UHC that countries have adopted. So there's a lot of focus on the UHC item. There's a lot of focus on making sure that there's adequate financial coverage to be able to access services, whether it's free at the point of care through refinancing or to be able to pay. The problem with that is even if people have access to financing, if they're living in places, let's say rural areas where there are no providers, then the financing doesn't really increase access to care. So there's limited progress on access to care. There's also the problem that what access to care has been prioritized under the UHC package tends to focus on an essential package, so a fairly minimalist package of essential services. And so what this means is that people may not have full coverage that they require for the medical conditions that they're confronted with. And of course, that's one way of trying to square the circle of implementing universal health coverage with limited fiscal space. So what we're seeing is that financing by centering financing as a priority, you're not really necessarily improving universal access to care. The other part of the report focuses on catastrophic spending and it's got data up to I think 2017. And what the data shows is that catastrophic expenditure on healthcare has become progressively worse. And so we can assume that definitely for the pandemic period, the strain would have continued. And so this is an issue that needs to be addressed. The WHO should now try to, as much as feasible, as much as possible, go beyond this disease specific focus. Of course diseases need to be addressed, but this is the one organization that is mandated with the health rights for all. And it is the only one on the arena that has this mandate, including the normative one. So I would have imagined and I would still expect the WHO to have an approach to worse health that is more focused on prevention, for example, of looking at environmental policies, of looking, for example, at some trends that are in a way triggering zoonotic events like wildlife trading, looking at things that happen in this world that are very much related to health, but are totally untouched by the real agenda of the WHO. COVID-19 has kind of normalized inequalities. And COVID-19 has shown so many aspects of the socio-economic inequalities, exasperating them that exist in this world. And yet we go back to diseases. But we know, according to the Alma Ata Declaration, according to the very basic notions of health, that health is not a technical medical thing. It is a political agenda that needs to look at people's dignity. And if we continue on the vertical disease approach through biomedical solutions, I think we have not learned very much from the very eloquent pedagogy of COVID-19.