The World Health Organization (WHO) announced today that the COVID-19 global health emergency is over. With nearly seven million people dead and no clear answers as to the origins of the pandemic, AIDS Healthcare Foundation urges World Health Assembly Member States to adopt a new global public health convention to ensure the world does not revert to complacency on pandemic preparedness.

“The daily death toll may have subsided but the world’s woeful unpreparedness for the next, inevitable outbreak remains a dire emergency. An even bigger tragedy than losing seven million lives will be the world not learning from what went wrong with the bungled response to COVID,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “The emergency was declared too late because politics got in the way of public health. Evidence as to what happened at the Wuhan lab is still missing. Vaccine nationalism was a profound failure of global solidarity. We have a moral obligation to those we lost to ensure these lessons don’t go unheeded. We need nothing short of a paradigm shift in global public health based on principles of cooperation, transparency, and accountability.”

About AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)

AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.7 million people in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter: @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare.

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