EU Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides, and WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, will be officially launching the adoption and scaling up of the EU Digital COVID Certificate to the global level in Geneva in a meeting on Monday, the Cyprus News Agency has learned.
In practice, this means that the digital certificate which has become a global standard and is used by almost 80 EU and non-EU countries today, will become a tool for global cooperation on digital health policy.
More specifically, WHO is due to take up the technical framework of the EU Digital COVID Certificate as of 1 July 2023, in order to establish a new global system in digital health documentation, under the new WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network.
The aim of the initiative is for the tool to help address ongoing and future health threats, especially in case of a new international or global pandemic, as well as facilitate mobility and help deliver better public health for citizens worldwide.
The certificate was developed in record time during the most difficult period of the COVID-19 pandemic and contributed to the effort by member states to reopen their economies and societies safely.
Commissioner Kyriakides and Dr Adhanom Ghebreyesus had signed on December 2nd 2022 an agreement to deepen strategic cooperation between the EU and WHO, to strengthen the role of the WHO in the global health architecture, and promote the priorities of the EU Global Health Strategy.
Source: Cyprus News Agency