GHTC’s director delivers remarks for Global COVID-19 Summit

GHTC’s director Jamie Bay Nishi was invited by the White House to deliver video remarks for yesterday’s Global COVID-19 Summit. Nishi’s remarks committed GHTC and its members to the shared summit targets and emphasized the need for world leaders to bolster surveillance and data sharing, increase testing to detect variants, support R&D and clinical trials for second wave therapeutic and vaccine candidates, and increase regional manufacturing capabilities. 

Video remarks and transcript are below:

Transcript of remarks:

My name is Jamie Bay Nishi, and I serve as the Director of the Global Health Technologies Coalition—a coalition of over 35 nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and aligned businesses advancing policies to accelerate the creation of new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other medical technologies that bring healthy lives within reach for all people.

GHTC is committed to the shared targets of this global COVID-19 summit, and in particular, the targets related to advancing research and development and manufacturing. This includes:

• Bolstering robust surveillance and data sharing, including for genomic sequencing 
• Increasing testing and analysis to detect emerging variants
• Supporting R&D and clinical trials for a second wave of therapeutic and vaccine candidates, and
• Increasing regional manufacturing capacities for ALL types of medical countermeasures

GHTC will continue to convene partners to assess gaps in the upstream R&D aspects of the COVID-19 response, work to remove policy barriers, and in turn will optimize product developer’s abilities to advance research, deliver, and deploy technologies fit for purpose and that can reach the last mile. 

GHTC also supports the creation of a global health security financial intermediary fund and will leverage our platform to elevate perspectives of national and regional stakeholders, especially those from lower- and middle-income countries to ensure global investments in increasing R&D and manufacturing capabilities are driven in a way best suited to strengthening pandemic preparedness in each local context.

No one is safe until everyone is safe, and tangible collective action is the only way we will meet the targets of vaccinating the world, saving lives, and building back better.