WHO and the French government have collaboratively announced a fresh €50 million contribution which will help the healthcare system in France dwarf the bottlenecks in response to COVID-19 and also enhance access to testing, vaccines, and overall treatments. The agreement was put into force on the sidelines of the foreign and health ministers’ ministerial conference, which took place in France’s Lyon. The idea is to support the work accomplished by WHO and also co-convenors’ work as far as health systems go in alliance with the global body’s response plans as well as its preparedness to fight out the pandemic. Speaking on the occasion, WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the world health body is very grateful to France’s consistent commitment to unity towards the pandemic’s response.
The Health System and Response Connectors work to make sure that the countries have the technical, financial, as well as operational capabilities and resources to acquire and use vaccines efficiently, along with other COVID-19 tools. It is assumed that the contribution of France will help in speeding up equitable access to all the pandemic tools by way of looking at each country’s health systems’ issues and also identifying the right responses and answers to them. Apparently, the involvement will work through HSRC to ensure that mere vaccines turn into well-thought-about vaccination campaigns and also pursue community-based testing platforms in order to help public health measures and disease surveillance as well. All this would lead to a robust national response output while also re-establishing life in the health systems.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, who happens to be the Foreign Minister of France, opines that the French presidency of the EU gives global health unparalleled importance. With this kind of support to WHO, additional help shall be given to the countries’ health systems, which will also, in a way, strengthen the cooperation between actors, increase the possibility of fruitful dialogues between stakeholders, and thereby speed up the COVID-19 tools and ensure their availability across the length and breadth of the regions to save millions of lives reeling under the threat.
It goes without saying that France shares significant health priorities with WHO and has always put forth a cross-cutting way of also giving equal importance to health coverage as a part of its sustainable development agenda, which keeps an eye on 2030. Just prior to when the pandemic struck, sometime in January 2020, France and WHO put on paper a new framework for five years that confirmed the country’s role as a key contributor to global health while at the same time giving unrelenting support to WHO’s General Programme of Work that takes into account the well-being of citizens of all ages.