Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday called for reforming the World Health Organization and streamlining its approval process for vaccines and therapeutics, and came out in favor of relaxing WTO rules on commercial aspects of intellectual property rights. In his address to the second virtual global summit on Covid-19 hosted by US President Joe Biden, Modi also said a coordinated global response is needed to tackle future health emergencies and called for building a chain. resilient global supply chain for equitable access to vaccines and medicines. Modi said the World Health Organization must be reformed and strengthened to build a more resilient global health security architecture. The Prime Minister’s call to relax WTO rules, in particular the TRIPS Agreement, came more than a year and a half after India and South Africa offered the WTO world trade to temporarily waive intellectual property rights for the production of Covid-19 vaccines to effectively deal with the pandemic. “It is clear that a coordinated global response is needed to tackle future health emergencies. We need to build a resilient global supply chain and enable equitable access to vaccines and medicines,” Modi said. “WTO rules, especially TRIPS, need to be more flexible. The WHO needs to be reformed and strengthened to build a more resilient global health security architecture,” he said during the session. top opening. India has been pushing for the waiver of the TRIPS Agreement to ensure the scaling up of vaccine production for equitable and global access. “We also call for the streamlining of the WHO approval process for vaccines and therapeutics to keep supply chains stable and predictable. As a responsible member of the global community, India stands ready to play a key role in these efforts,” Modi said. In his address, the Prime Minister also explained how India’s genomics consortium has contributed significantly to the global database on the virus and added that New Delhi will extend this network to neighboring countries. “In India, we have widely used our traditional medicines to complement our fight against Covid and to boost immunity, saving countless lives. Last month, we laid the foundations of the ‘WHO Center for Traditional Medicine’ in India, with the aim of making this age-old knowledge available to the world,” he said. Referring to India’s handling of the pandemic, Modi said the country had fully vaccinated nearly 90 % of adult population and more than 50 million children.” Our immunization program is the largest in the world. We have fully vaccinated almost 90% of the adult population and over 50 million children. India is manufacturing four WHO-approved vaccines and has the capacity to produce five billion doses this year,” he said. “We have provided over 200 million doses to 98 countries, bilaterally and through COVAX. India has developed low-cost Covid mitigation technologies for testing, processing and data management. We have offered these capabilities to other countries,” Modi said. The prime minister said the Covid pandemic continues to disrupt “lives, supply chains and test the resilience of open societies.” , we have adopted a people-centric strategy against the pandemic. We have allocated the highest ever allocation to our annual health budget,” he said. Modi also attended the first global virtual summit on Covid-19 hosted by Biden on September 22 this year. The second summit aims to galvanize new action to address the lingering challenges of the pandemic and build a stronger global health security architecture.President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President South African Cyril Ramaphosa were among the top leaders who addressed the summit.Source: redif.com