Thank you, Liam and hello to everyone. Sadly, I am speaking from Portugal because we can’t travel, basically. And hopefully we will be together sooner than later as we overcome these difficult times. I know time is of essence, so I’ll try to be brief saying that it is consensual that we need to understand that we will not get our economies fully reopening until we fully control the health crisis we are facing. And we know that the economy and health are two sides of the same coin and never in modern history have politicians been asked to work on a global health issue with this amount of in-depth knowledge. Like any other recent epidemic or outbreaks we, governmental officials, elected officials, policymakers, the truth is most of us are reacting instead of preventing. And with Covid-19, the truth is we’ve reacted first with non-clinical tools that we had at our disposal to try to delay the spread of virus and then we had to quickly invest in technology and innovation to try to produce diagnostics and therapeutics that could, in an affordable way, be deployed to respond.

And now we have vaccines and we believe that these are, as has been mentioned, a critical tool to solve many of the issues and problems that we are dealing with. And, so, being very blunt, we are not going to find easy answers for difficult questions and rolling out vaccines in high-income countries will not guarantee that those welfare states are secure, that the economy will continue to grow or that jobs will be produced. Unless we secure health for all, and most importantly the most vulnerable populations of the world, we will all be vulnerable and no innovation or science or technology will prevent or save us from an international health and economic crisis, harder, tougher and more dramatic than ever ones because of the global goals that have been jeopardized and we cannot go backwards.

That is why we, as members of Parliaments, Congresses and Senates, must take the initiative, leadership and ownership of our most important duty to represent and serve our constituencies with needed budget allocation, effective policies and adequate laws and to build back better, to attain inclusive growth by tackling global health security we must deliver an affordable and equitable and fair distribution of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, ensuring political will for universal access to vaccines and ensure adequate access to international liquidity for these countries. This means fully funding Covax, for example, and to raise the additional 2.8 billion US dollars that are needed for its objectives of distributing vaccines for the most vulnerable populations in the world and also ensuring adequate and timely distribution of the excess vaccines from the high-income countries.

And, with this in mind and acknowledging that there is a lot of work being done by multilateral organizations of which, of course, the World Bank and IMF play such an important role, and we’re following what Liam had said, it is with great pleasure that I’m very proud to announce on behalf of the Parliamentary Network of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and also on behalf of the Unite Parliamentarians Network to end infectious diseases, that we will be creating and launching, as of today, a working group dedicated to global health. And I call on all of our esteemed colleagues from around the world, if they have interest in being part of this working group, to flag their interest to our secretariats. We believe that this working group, as part of our organization, is important as a way to show our unprecedented commitment from a wide range of officials and bringing together global health security with social and economic recovery to build back better while preparing, preventing and protecting our most vulnerable populations against future pandemics and reinstall trust, transparency between governments, international organizations by holding these accountables with the power that these legislators have.

We commit to ensure, then, transparency and political accountability to multilateral commitments, increased political advocacy towards initiatives like Covax and other pillars of Act A and rebuilding our economic models by enabling an agenda of inclusive and effective policies that can be official in the new post-pandemic world. It is, therefore, our ambition to bring together different institutions and partners to utilize the synergic political power of all of our networks to the attainment of our ambitious goals. And, of course, to make sure that the SDGs continue to be the beacon that leads the way towards 2030 and to make sure that we do not lose track of the commitments we have made in the past.

Now, more than ever, and to end, the people need their representatives to be up to the challenge of working beyond our own short-term political cycles and preparing for the future. This is our moral obligation; I believe this is our destiny. It is in our hands to make sure no one is left behind and failure is not an option. Thank you.