Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan chairs opening session of 33rd meeting of Health Ministers of Commonwealth countries

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan yesterday chaired the opening session of the 33rd meeting of Health Ministers of Commonwealth countries through video conferencing. The  theme of the conference was “Commonwealth Response to COVID-19: Ensuring Equitable Access to Vaccines and Building Resilience for Health Systems and Emergencies. 

Speaking on the pandemic, the Minister said, it has already run into hundreds of billions of dollars leading to a significant contraction in the global economy. The road to recovery may be hard and shall only pick up pace once the entire world is



able to put the pandemic behind  together.

He said, for effectively ending the pandemic, more COVID-19 vaccines need to be developed and must be deployed rapidly across the world once proven to be both safe and efficacious against the virus. 

He mentioned that to this end, the WHO-led initiative ‘Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator’ has proven to be a ground-breaking global collaboration which is expediting development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines.