GA 2022-Speech GMA President-Oct2022

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Bundespräsidialamt
11010 Berlin
0049 30 2000 2021
0049 30 181 0200 2870
presse@bpra.bund.de
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Read the speech online:
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Video message from
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
to the General Assembly of the World Medical Association
in Berlin
on 7 October 2022
Humans have been striving to rid the world of pain, depression,
disease and death since time immemorial. “Primum non nocere,
secundum cavere, tertium sanare” – do no harm, be careful, heal! This
guiding principle of the Hippocratic tradition applies unchanged to
doctors around the world to this very day, even after 2,000 years. The
driving force behind medical research and the medical profession is
therefore a kind of primal instinct for which no effort is too great and no
means too expensive. And yet, abominable crimes committed in many
wars have shown that the medical profession needs an international and
intercultural set of values which lays down respect for human life as an
unalterable tenet.
In order to define this tenet for the medical profession, issues of
medical ethics were the focus of attention when the World Medical
Association (WMA) was founded in Paris in 1947, and the World Health
Organization (WHO) in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
was proclaimed by the UN and the Declaration of Geneva by the World
Medical Association in the same year. These documents, the mark of a
civilised world, were preceded before and during the Second World War
by barbaric crimes, committed in particular by doctors from Germany. I
am grateful and relieved that today we have left this dark chapter in our
country’s history far behind us and that we can now look back together
on 75 years of continuous work on medical ethics by the World Medical
Association and the German Medical Association in Germany. In your
organisation’s early years, it certainly could not have been taken for
granted that today I would have the privilege of welcoming you to the
General Assembly of the World Medical Association in the German capital
or that German physicians would have been active members of your
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organisation for decades. It is a great honour to have you with us here
in Germany for the fourth time: welcome to Berlin!
I would like to thank you, Dr Reinhardt, and you, Dr Montgomery,
as the President and Honorary President of the German Medical
Association, for all your work in preparing this conference. I am certain
that the German Medical Association will represent our country well and
will offer you, physicians from almost all regions of the world, an
attractive and stimulating programme for your week in this city. By the
way, we are very proud of this city’s renowned hospital, which bears the
name Charité – or charity. We are delighted that a WHO Hub for
Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence is to be established here.
In the 75 years of its existence, the World Medical Association has
embraced the civilisational progress of the medical profession and drawn
up guidelines which have been largely incorporated as international
standards into the codes of professional conduct for physicians in
individual countries. The guiding principles were always to place the
Hippocratic imperative to heal to the fore, to protect the sensitive
confidential relationship between doctor and patient and to curb the
drive to make new medical discoveries where, for example, the human
rights of those taking part in trials are not guaranteed.
You all know this constitutive basis for medical practice as the
Declaration of Geneva or the Declaration of Helsinki. During your
General Assembly, you intend to add a declaration against racism in
medicine to these foundation documents on medical ethics. Your aim is
to ensure that even greater emphasis is placed on equality, both that of
patients and of doctors. If your conference succeeds in adopting this
declaration, it would mark an important step on the road towards a
global understanding of the fundamental values of peaceful co-existence
among nations. I encourage you to take it. Of course, I wish you a
productive debate and every success with your other projects, such as
the International Medical Code of Ethics. This code is intended to address
the needs of our age in relation to the medical profession and to focus
attention on equality and justice in the health sector.
At the same time, however, we see that much of what has been
achieved in the sphere of medical ethics thanks to the work of the WMA,
and which we regarded as the norm until recently, are by no means that.
With Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, we are witnessing a
relapse into pre-modern times, also in terms of medical ethics. Doctors
have to risk their own lives in the war zones to help the injured. As an
international community, we have to press for humanitarian workers to
finally be granted access to combat zones.
However, many other deep-seated challenges, such as global
pandemics or the impact of accelerating climate change, have seriously
tested the medical profession. In the COVID-19 pandemic, many
physicians were pushed beyond their limits to save lives and have given
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everything in therapies and research to fight this coronavirus which has
jumped to humans for the first time. It remains a once-in-a-hundred-
years occurrence, indeed a medical miracle, that the world was able to
produce vaccines for an acute pandemic at unprecedented speed in a
cooperative division of labour among international research networks.
More than any other profession, doctors are the ones who allayed the
concerns of their patients by providing up-to-date information in
confidential conversations and developed therapies. I would like to thank
you all most sincerely for that.
The objective of the COVAX initiative remains relevant in light of
the uneven distribution of vaccines. I therefore urge the international
community to provide substantial help in the form of vaccine supplies
and health information, especially to nations with weaker economies.
Only if we overcome the pandemic in a spirit of cooperation we will be
able to maintain trust, the most valuable resource in the co-existence
among states.
The current pandemic has speeded up our learning curve when it
comes to improving global health and has released huge resources. But
on its own, it is not enough. We will remain reliant on a spirit of
cooperation and mutual trust among states in order to strengthen the
international community’s resilience in future pandemics and health
crises. It therefore continues to be absolutely vital that we are better
prepared when it comes to global health. For the advance of climate
change is also altering human habitats and putting pressure on
healthcare systems in many different ways. Your profession in particular
is confronted with the concrete impact of climate change on people’s
daily lives. For that reason, strengthening global health and therapies
for environmental diseases are among the measures needed to adapt to
climate change.
The 75th anniversary of the World Medical Association and the
75th anniversary of the German Medical Association is an auspicious
occasion to thank you, as representatives of all physicians, for your daily
service – in practices, in hospitals, as well as in research and teaching.
You accompany human life from the beginning to the end. People place
their trust in you, in good and even more so in difficult times. You want
to – and will – continue to learn and heal together, as well as to devote
yourselves to science and humanity. On that note, thank you very much.
I wish you a stimulating General Assembly and an interesting stay here
in Berlin!