End of the SEMViD-50 public health emergency (speech)
On 4 October 2051, Dr. Chérine Boukari, Director-General of the World Health Organization, delivered a statement in Geneva declaring the end of the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over SEMViD-50. The statement is commonly referred to as the speech that ended the SEMViD-50 emergency.
Background
On 21 July 2050, on the advice of an Emergency Committee convened under the International Health Regulations (IHR), the Director-General had declared a PHEIC for the SEMViD-50 emergency. Over the following 14 months, the Emergency Committee convened another 10 times for oversight of the evolving outbreak and countermeasures. After a vaccine had become available in December 2050 and was widely distributed, reported severe cases and deaths fell sharply during 2051, and political pressure grew since August 2051 to declare an end to the state of emergency.
The statement
The statement was delivered following the eleventh meeting of the Emergency Committee, which recommended that the emergency be ended. Director-General Chérine Boukari accepted the recommendation and announced the establishment of a Review Committee to develop standing recommendations for countries under the IHR. While declaring the emergency over, Boukari cautioned that SEMViD-50 remained a global health threat, noting that the virus was expected to remain permanently established in wild bird populations. She called on Member States and partners to secure long-term financing for vaccination programmes, warned against dismantling surveillance and vector control capacities, and linked the emergence of the outbreak to climate-driven changes in the distribution of vector-borne disease.
Full statement
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening.
Four hundred and fifty days ago, WHO learned of a cluster of 26 cases of severe encephalitis of unknown cause in the south of Switzerland.
On the 21st of July 2050, on the advice of an Emergency Committee convened under the International Health Regulations, I declared a public health emergency of international concern – the highest level of alarm under international law.
At that time the virus had no name, no test, and no vaccine.
In the months that followed, more than 22,000 cases and 1,540 deaths were reported in the European Region alone, and we know the true number of infections was two to three times higher. Within a single season the virus spread worldwide, with cases arising across Asia, South America, Africa and Oceania. In some of these countries, case numbers remained lower as the local populations have many years of experience dealing with vector-borne disease - yet, we had to attribute more than 4,000 deaths worldwide to this new virus.
But this outbreak was never only a matter of case counts. Thousands of survivors are still living with the consequences of an infection that reached their brain. Many are young, and many will need care for years. Blood transfusion services were disrupted across an entire continent, and surgeries and cancer treatments were postponed as a result.
And this emergency did not arrive alone. It came in the same summer as the floods, and it came to places where, twenty years ago, the vector that carries it could not have survived the winter. Water, weather and disease are not separate agendas. Last year they were a single crisis. A vaccine became available last December – a remarkable achievement, delivered in months rather than years. Since the beginning of this summer, fewer than 300 severe cases and seven deaths have been reported worldwide.
Yesterday, the Emergency Committee met for the eleventh time and recommended that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice. It is therefore with great hope that I declare SEMViD-50 over as a global health emergency. However, that does not mean SEMViD-50 is over as a global health threat. The virus is now established in wild birds across many regions of the world, and it will in all likelihood remain there permanently. We cannot eradicate it from the sky. Every summer, wherever the vector is present and people are unprotected, it can return.
The vaccine protects very well against severe disease, but it does not appear to protect for life. Studies now under way will tell us how often we must revaccinate, and whom. And here I must be direct. The doses exist, and so does the manufacturing capacity – including in the countries that once waited longest. The pandemic accord worked as it was designed to. What does not yet exist is secure, long-term financing to vaccinate every exposed population, year after year. Today I ask Member States and partners to close that gap. An emergency ends when the alarm is switched off. A programme must not.
To the Emergency Committee and its chair, Professor Amara Ndiaye: thank you for fifteen months of careful judgement. To my colleagues, and to the veterinarians, entomologists and climate scientists who did not treat this as someone else’s emergency: One Health has long been our language, and last year it became our practice.
The map of risk is being redrawn faster than our institutions are adapting to it. Every year we delay in confronting the causes of that shift, we are choosing the next emergency.
Thank you.