Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya addresses G20 Joint Finance and Health Ministers’ Meeting

Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya on Friday addressed the G20 Joint Finance and Health Ministers’ Meeting through video conferencing. Agenda of the discussion was “Concrete proposals to strengthen global health financing governance”. In his address, Dr. Mandaviya said that COVID-19 pandemic has brought to fore the importance of International Health Regulations and the need for strengthening global health governance. While supporting the present proposal for Joint Health and Financing Task force, India proposes that centrality of World Health Organisation-WHO needs to be maintained in the health arena.

He said, India also proposes that while multiple entities with overlapping mandates are delving on the issue of pandemic preparedness and response, a clearly defined complementarity of all such initiatives to create a global health emergency management architecture is the need of the hour. He said, there is also a need to synchronize these multilateral initiatives amongst member states as per their local context at national level. Dr. Mandaviya also said that G20 needs to aid in increasing available funds to WHO besides supporting ongoing multi-stakeholder mechanisms.