The India Global Forum 2021 kickstarted on July 30th with an engaging conversation on a topic of radical actions for the post-pandemic era. India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr S Jaishankar and Former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, spoke on what needs to be done to build a better post-pandemic future for all.
Former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair commented on how public health has become important when during the pandemic. He said that we need first, incentivise the development of science and technology. He added that we can deal with global change if we could be able to grow more sustainability. Tony Blair gave his perspective on the wealthy part of the world, which created the problem, must put in place the resources for the developing world, as it grows in a more sustainable way.
“Currently, Africa has 1.2 billion people, over the next 30-40 years, it will grow to 2 billion people, where around 30-40 per cent access to electricity, it means access to the internet and other things. We will have to help them with major projects that are sustainable. The developing world needs to grow and should have access to power and connectivity, so the challenge is how to make a continent like Africa grow in a sustainable way, because if you can’t, then it will be difficult to reach our climate change objective,” said Blair.
With regards to public health and Covid-19, he said that new variants are rising in India, UK, Brazil and it is important to get the world vaccinated because we will get fresh variants that may circumvent the vaccines we have.
“We may have to adapt vaccines, carry vaccine production, we will have to coordinate vaccine production so that we are creating enough vaccines to help vulnerable, front line workers. We have a lot of work to do, we must create global infrastructure, pandemic preparedness around things like genomics surveillance, how are we shortening the period between identifying a virus, developing vaccines, producing, and distributing. The ambition is to pull down the 15-month process to a 3months process. That requires a lot of organisational and cooperation in the world,” said Blair.
He also highlighted a point on vaccine awareness and mentioned that it is very important. According to Blair, there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy among people. He said that countries should publish data on vaccine effectiveness and should be made accessible to the public, so that lot of people will go for vaccination without any doubt or hesitation. Along with this, data should be collected in order to show people the vaccination status. More people will have access, more will come ahead for the vaccination.
