A chance to reclaim the health of humanity

India’s presidency of G-20 is a unique opportunity for the global community to build a consensus around a guiding philosophy that collaboration has a much higher value than competition in healthcare. It’s a simple adage but has not proved very easy to practise for the world. Its effectiveness, however, has been tested in the recent public health emergency posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, because of global collaboration cutting across country boundaries, near impossibilities turned into realities like scientists discovering vaccines in record-breaking time. In areas like distribution of Covid-19 vaccines across the globe, where the global community competed fiercely, almost hoarding resources for people of their nationalities, while other communities in low resource countries remained vulnerable, we can hardly claim a similar success.

This scramble and struggle for resources like vaccines, diagnostics, medicines among other essentials could have been eased, if not fully prevented, had the global community learnt to think, plan and act in a harmonious manner. The lessons that the pandemic offered can be reflected upon as part of G-20 deliberations under India’s presidency. The world’s biggest health crisis can also be the biggest opportunity for global leaders to reinvent the architecture of collaboration to ensure affordable and accessible healthcare for all.

Are we ready to face the next health emergency?

As the world was battling Covid-19, progress made on many threats, including antimicrobial resistance, elimination of tuberculosis, etc has backslided, and these health challenges are today turning into much bigger crises than they were in the pre-pandemic era. Also, having navigated through the pandemic, the loss of health and lives remains one of the biggest common fears among the global citizenry cutting across developed, developing and least developed countries. It is this latent fear that makes any news about the emergence of new variants of existing viruses go viral today. Scientists across the globe are sounding a note of caution about how climate change-induced global warming has increased the chances of viruses posing ‘health dangers’ to the world. These warnings are coming close on the heels of a sharp increase in the frequency and incidence of zoonotic outbreaks across the world in the last few decades.

Scientists have warned that Covid-19, in all likelihood, is not the last pandemic. The question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the next pandemic would strike. Therefore, we, as a global family, should be better prepared to prevent and effectively respond to a health emergency of pandemic proportions. This is going to be a priority area during the G-20 deliberations under India’s presidency.

A world with diagnostic, vaccines, medicines for all

India’s pandemic experience — including developing, manufacturing, distributing and actually administering vaccines to not only the billion-plus population at home but also across the world through Vaccine Maitri — enables it to steer the deliberations with tangible outcome-led goals that can serve the global south as well as the global north.

The world has much to learn from the sense of collaboration displayed by the global scientific community during the pandemic, which placed humanity above parochial interests to come up with vaccine solutions that ended up saving nearly 20 million lives in 2021 alone, according to an estimate cited in the Human Development Report 2022. If the same spirit can be imbibed by all of us, our collective response to the next global health threat can improve significantly.

When an infection spreads, it doesn’t honour boundaries and doesn't differentiate between a rich and a poor country. Therefore, it is important for the highly interconnected world today to realise that the health of one human is inextricably linked to that of another, irrespective of their disparate, far-removed contexts. That early diagnosis, treatment, and prevention in an outbreak are a collective responsibility of the world, irrespective of which part of the globe it strikes in, is a mindset that the global community has to internalise and institutionalise. 

India’s presidency of G-20 provides us a platform to take this global mission forward. Some of our strengths position us uniquely to strive to build a global consensus and look for collaborative solutions. India has been called the pharmacy of the world for a few decades now, but Covid-19 also showed that India is well-poised to become the vaccine superpower of the world. Supplying over 50 per cent of the global demand for vaccines and nearly 20 per cent of generic medicines by volume worldwide, India is uniquely placed to start a conversation and look for solutions on how the world should make quality vaccines, medicines and diagnostics affordable and accessible to all.

Future of health is digital

Our experiences in the pandemic also clearly showed us that the future of our health is predominantly digital. In more than one way, technology saved lives during Covid-19, be it through tele-medicine consultations or facilitating access to vaccine programmes at an unprecedented scale. World leaders need to make informed choices and ensure that technology is used for the good of everyone, irrespective of where the individual lives, so that its benefits accrue equitably to all.

As universal adult vaccination was attempted for the first time at a large scale during Covid-19, India used "CoWin" platform to digitally monitor, facilitate and record the entire process, and later offered the solution to other countries for adaptation to their contexts. India also expedited and adapted tele-medicine solutions for home-bound patients and has seen a slew of recent successes in making available common digital public health goods for its citizens.

Using its own experiences as assets, India’s G-20 presidency allows us an unparalleled opportunity to strive and forge a common global vision for digital health for the entire humanity.

The one piece of wisdom deeply embedded in the ancient Indian culture of treating the whole universe as one family may hold within itself the seed to success for the vision of Health For All. After all, sometimes looking deep into the past may save the future.

The writer is Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

(Views expressed are personal)