WORLD HEALTH'S WONDER : SOLUTION ESSAY

The Collaboration I'm Most Proud Of : Leaders from the worlds of policy, business, the arts and advocacy share their most powerful partnerships.

At its heart, the pandemic is a crisis of solidarity and sharing of data and information, biological samples, and resources and tools.

Covid-19 has shown the importance of rapid and broad sharing of information about pathogens for effective surveillance and the timely development of medical-response products such as diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

A great deal of pathogen sharing is done on an ad hoc basis and bilaterally, which risks leaving out some countries and may mean that dangerous emerging pathogens are missed. That's we set up two new hubs :

One to allow our 194 member states to voluntarily share novel biological materials, and another to detect new events with pandemic potential and monitor disease-control measures in real time.

Both hubs will be key to preparing for and responding to future epidemics and pandemics.

ONCE signal is detected, as well as responding to curtail spread, it's important to develop critical health tools and share them effectively.

In April 2020, WHO, the European Commission, France, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation formed the Access to Covid-19 Tools [ACT] Accelerator to speed up the development and production of Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines, and ensure equitable access to them.

Raising billions of dollars, it has helped improve access to health tools globally.

But narrow nationalism and hoarding by some countries have undermined equity and created the ideal conditions for the Omicron variant to emerge.

In 2022, it's critical that nations work together even more closely to vaccinate the world and equitably share all health tools. One way to increase production of lifesaving tools is to pool technology.

WHO's mRNA technology to transfer hub in South Africa will enable development of a more affordable mRNA vaccine.

Recently, the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and the Medicines Patent Pool finalized their first licensing deal with the Spanish National Research Council, a transparent global and nonexclusive license for a serological antibody test.

I hope it's the first of many.

With talks about to begin for a binding accord among nations on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, it's important that the world leaders seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well being of all people.

The World Students Society thanks Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General World Health Organization.