Climate change had ‘completely changed the landscape’: PM Shehbaz
RIYADH, April 28 (SABAH): Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday highlighted the “global inequity” in healthcare.
PM Shehbaz Sharif made the remarks while speaking at a panel discussion on ‘Redefining Global Health Agenda’ during the special meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Riyadh.
The premier said that when he visited Saudi Arabia in 2003, he was “struck by a very nasty cancer”. He said that he was then flown to New York and had to undergo surgery costing “thousands of dollars”.
“And I wondered how many people in my country can afford this kind of expensive treatment — not very many,” he said. PM Shehbaz Sharif said that when he came back to Pakistan, he was elected the chief minister of Punjab and his government built hospitals specialising in kidney and liver diseases as well as cancer.
“Today, I think the first and foremost problem is global inequity,” he said, adding that the Covid-19 pandemic had “exposed” these imbalances and gaps.
“Imagine the global North and the global South; distribution of vaccines and so on and so forth,” he said.
He further said that climate change had “completely changed the landscape”. “Pakistan does not contribute [to] even a fraction of emissions. Yet we are on the red list of climate change and in 2022, we experienced the worst floods in Pakistan […] and we had to invest hundreds and billions of rupees to rehabilitate people.”
He said that as the Punjab chief minister, he was able to provide healthcare to the people of the province. He said that he also built a kidney and liver hospital, saying it was “probably the best in South Asia”.
Talking about the 2011 dengue outbreak, he said that it was “probably the biggest around the globe”.
“I must confess that I did not know much about dengue. But from six in the morning till late at night, I would have meetings […] it was a challenge of sorts. I had machines […] placed in hospitals […] and through a decree I made all labs responsible for providing tests at a meagre cost,” he said.
“I think this is how we can achieve results with meagre resources. But that does not mean that the yawning gap between global North and global South should not be addressed,” he said.
Talking about polio, he said that Pakistan was a “great beneficiary” of the Bill Gates Foundation. “If I did not acknowledge Bill Gates’ generosity here, it will not be fair to myself and fair to him.
“Despite the 2022 floods, which washed away large swathes of land, we — with great difficulty — were able to vaccinate children […] and I think one day soon we will be over the hump,” he said.
The prime minister — accompanied by a high-level delegation, including Foreign Minister Senator Mohammad Ishaq Dar and Finance Minister Senator Muhammad Aurangzeb — had landed in Saudi Arabia a day ago.