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EVENT

Increasing access to medical oxygen: Actions to ensure sustained gains


76th World Health Assembly

76th World Health Assembly
Geneva

This World Health Assembly (WHA) high-level side event marked the adoption of the “Increasing Access to Medical Oxygen” WHA resolution and introduced the Global Oxygen Alliance (GO2AL) as two important steps in recognizing and reaffirming the critical role of medical oxygen in building resilient health systems.

This high-level side event Increasing access to medical oxygen: Action to ensure sustained gains was convened by the newly established Global Oxygen Alliance (GO2AL), with the support of Unitaid, the World Health Organization, and PATH. The event marked the adoption of the “Increasing Access to Medical Oxygen” World Health Assembly resolution and introduce GO2AL as two important steps in recognizing and reaffirming the critical role of medical oxygen in building resilient health systems.

The event was hosted by Mr. Jérôme Bonnafont, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations Office in Geneva and international organizations in Switzerland, on the sidelines of the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva on Wednesday, 24 May 2023, from 17:30 – 20:30.

The event included two sessions: (1) high-level panel discussions followed by (2) a cocktail reception. More information is available in the event programme, available in English and French.

Photo gallery: Increasing access to medical oxygen: Action to ensure sustained gains

Event summary

The high-level panel discussions were divided in two parts, with opening and closing remarks. See below for more details.

Opening remarks

The audience was welcomed by the French Ambassador for Global Health, with introductions from partners at PATH, and opening remarks from representatives of the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Health Organization. See below for highlights from their remarks.

The lack of medical oxygen during the pandemic led to an extraordinary mobilization at the international leve in order to facilitate access to all countries and to reduce barriers to its use.
The world now knows that access to oxygen is access to life. I must say, on our own we were rather invisible, and together, we have become invincible.
The WHO resolution to increasing access to medical oxygen - it will be an important milestone in this journey of saving lives. We believe with the right mission, inclusive innovation, and respectful partnerships we can make this world a better place.
The [oxygen] resolution, the launch of the Global Oxygen Alliance, and all of the investments and partnerships that have been established to date, make me hopeful that we can achieve universally accessible medical oxygen.
Let us not lose the opportunity created by COVID-19 pandemic to push ahed with the reforms that will drive performance and value creation across the global oxygen health ecosystem.
So you can recognise the need for the initiative, the Global Oxygen Alliance, to coordinate the implementation of the resolution to sustain the gains. We pledge our commitments to work with the newly established Global Alliance and we take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Member States for the support at every stage that led to adoption of the resolution.
Before the pandemic, we more or less treated oxygen as a luxury for the world. That was despite pneumonia being the number one killer of children ages one to five. That was despite tuberculosis, a respiratory illness, being the biggest infectious disease killer in human history.
We came to recognize early in the pandemic that this was our single most effective therapeutic remedy for COVID. We could talk about the monoclonal antibodies and a variety of other things all we wanted - we needed oxygen. And that led us down a learning path that brought investment of over US$100 million that brought oxygen capacity to over 50 countries in our own work.
I look forward to all we're going to learn from the technical experts in the course of our discussion, but especially also all of you who we are encouraging to join in our U.S. Commitment to support this resolutions, to participate in GO2AL, and to continue to contribute to ensuring that everyone has the oxygen they need to breathe.
The world has woken up to the value of oxygen, and we've woken up to the fact that we can actually deliver it.
The one thing that I've seen in terms of bringing this idea of oxygen self-sufficiency into countries... We can do this everywhere. There is not a context in which this has not been done during this pandemic... We just haven't done it in enough places, and we haven't done it sustainably, and we haven't done it in a way that it can be done across all diseases.
Oxygen saves lives. But we need to get oxygen to where it can save lives and that's our biggest barrier.

Part 1: World Health Assembly “Increasing access to medical oxygen” resolution

The first panel was opened and moderated by oxygen champions from the World Health Organization. Representatives from Chad, Nepal, and Peru discussed the importance of oxygen in their respective countries, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of the WHA resolution to sustain those gains. See below for highlights from their remarks.

Part 2: Launch of the Global Oxygen Alliance (GO2AL)

The second panel was opened and moderated by the Executive Director of the Lean on Me Foundation. Representatives from multilateral agencies and leaders of GO2AL, including Unitaid, The Global Fund, World Heath Organization/Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and UNICEF, discussed the importance of the Alliance in continuing and building upon the efforts to scale up oxygen beyond the pandemic response. See below for highlights from their remarks.

As the spotlight on oxygen recedes and the COVID-18 emergency ends, it's essential to consolidate the gains, implement and operationalize the capital investments, maintain momentum, and at all costs avoid relapsing into neglect of this vital cross-cutting health system building block.
I want to acknowledge the people who have worked so hard to ensure that we have reached a point where we are declaring that we will ensure oxygen is accessible by everyone who needs it and save millions of lives. And I'm sure this zeal that we have right now, we are going to carry it to the end.
We moved the needle. There is a dramatic change, thanks to our work, but we know that more needs to be done. We have the same situation as before - the need to plan for th real needs, and the real needs are of day-to-day demand for oxygen beyond COVID-19.
The wake-up call - the nightmare call, I have to say- was dealing with COVID-19. So we need to change the reality. We need to change from the emergency mode to a more sustainable way to support countries.
never before have we seen such a massive surge in financing of infrastructure for oxygen supply-the distribution and delivery of oxygen at the beside. It must be our shared priority and collective responsibility to make sure that all these investments are supported, sustained, and that there are public health benefits realized.
With the COVID-19 pandemic now officially over, we remain in very dynamic times and countries are transitioning from an emergency reponse towards recovery and epidemic preparedness. And medical oxygen will play a critical role in that transition.
The global Oxygen Alliance is not only about money. It's an alliance that also bring together technical partners - about preparing good plans, about conducting technical assessment of the situation in countries, and about deciding where we're going to prioritize to make sure everyone has access.
And you'd be surprised to know two of the things that I wanted to bring the attention that are important for us to do to make this Alliance a successful one. It's capacity building and it's technical cooperation.
It took a pandemic like COVID-19 to remind us - the entire world - that two -thirds of people in low and middle-income countries do not have access to oxygen. I think this is a question that we really need to search our soul about.
At the political level we set up what we call the African Union COVID-19 Commission. And that comission actually looked at how to bring the entire continent of 1.3 billion people - 55 Member States - out of the COVID-19 pandemic, but much more importantly, how to restore and repair our health systems.
Our priority will be to ensure of course, that women and children have access to oxygen. And for that to happen, we'll need to ensure that oxygen is available at the primary health care level. And that decentralization of oxygen is an enormously complex task where in all honesty the physical product is probably the small part of the problem.
We are extremely proud to be part of GO2AL and to be running the Secretariat together with WHO - supporting the leadership of it. We hope we can continue what we started in terms of supporting these coordinated and collaborative efforts to ensure that oxygen is widely accesible.

Closing remarks

The panel discussions were closed by the Canadian Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations and the Assistant Director-General of Universal Health Coverage/Life Course at the World Health Organization. See below for highlights from their remarks.

From the beginning we knew how important it was to support a comprehensive response with testing, vaccines, health system, and delivery support, and of course, treatments. And it became clear, very early on in the pandemic, that one of the most valuable tools to fight COVID-19 was one that we already had - that of oxygen.
And all it took was a little virus, our COVID virus, to hit the world and spread around... just to remind me how lucky I was that I had oxygen. But in the same ICU where I spent a month, many of the people who followed frankly couldn't get enough oxygen fast enough.
We've come an extraordinary distance in a very short time over the last couple of years, and we have a huge distance to go yet. But when you see a full room like this talking about oxygen - the solutions - that it's doable. I won't be taking oxygen for granted and neighter will I take you all for granted for everything you're contributing to this.
And it was terrifying what happened. Yes, we were waiting for vaccines. Yes, we were waiting for new therapeutics, but we couldn't make something as simple as oxygen available to every people around the world. But the real tragedy is that it took COVID-19 to wake us up to that reality.