Budi said he would also push for WHO member states to adopt a global pandemic treaty along with a fund to back it up.
The goal would be to ensure “everybody has the same right to access” to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics if a new worldwide pandemic strikes.
That would avoid a situation in which “some country can stock six times the population (worth) of vaccine while the other country cannot get the vaccine because it’s already bought by some rich country,” Budi said.
He said the WHO was “not ready” for a new global outbreak, nor doing enough to deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s deadliest Ebola epidemic in history.
“The problem with this type of outbreak, if it happens specifically in a low-income country, the attention is not as big as like with COVID-19, where it also hit the high income” countries, he argued.
“We should be … putting more money … to address the issue for our African friends,” he said.
In January, WHO’s 34-member Executive Board will nominate up to three candidates to be submitted to the World Health Assembly of member states, which will choose its next head in May 2027.
Budi is running against candidates from Botswana, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Spain and China.