Madame and Mr. Presidents, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen,
Allow me to not use my prepared remarks because I don’t want to repeat what has already been said by very eloquent speakers before me. Let me just share with you a deeply personal story. My late mother contracted polio during the second World War, and she received the best possible care. She lived a fulfilling but very difficult and challenging life. She was one of the lucky ones. Many other children did not have such a future.
And as I was listening to Mr. Gates speaking about polio eradication, I was thinking of the tremendous progress that science has made over the past 50 years. And I was also thinking about the tremendous contribution that GAVI has made as a model private-public partnership, delivering vaccines to tens of millions of children, saving millions of lives.
And I believe that it is our duty, our contribution, to make sure that this work continues at a time when leading donors are stepping back, but also at a time when vaccine scepticism is rising across the world. I’m very happy and honoured that Europe, Team Europe, is stepping up to make up for the funding gap that has resulted from the decision of other leading donors not to continue with funding GAVI.
On behalf of the Greek people, I would like to announce that an initial recommendation by the Ministry of Finance was to contribute €2 million to the GAVI cause, but I’ve decided to increase that to €5 million. I was thinking that some of us came back from the NATO Summit in order to make sure that we are with you here today to reconfirm our support to GAVI. I was thinking that if we can afford, and rightly so, I may add, to spend 5% of our GDP on defence over the next years, we certainly can afford to contribute 5 million to GAVI.
Thank you very much.
