“While no country is out of the woods from the pandemic, WHO has collaborated with industry, academia and governments to deliver many tools to prevent and treat COVID-19. WHO and our partners are helping to make vaccines, tests and treatments accessible to people who need them, all over the world. As we enter the third year of this pandemic, I’m confident that this will be the year we end it – but only if we do it together.”

“As we enter a new stage of the pandemic, it goes without saying that we are fully committed to meeting people’s evolving needs. We will continue to strive to support those who are most impacted by COVID-19 and play our part in moving the world to the position of living with this disease by providing treatment options and tests that help people affected and allow society to function with few or no restrictions.”

“Healthcare systems in certain parts of the world are still struggling to cope with COVID-19 and care needs remain unprecedented. We want to make sure that our COVID-19 treatment options and tests reach as many eligible people as possible, but we can’t do this alone. We understand that addressing health inequalities is a shared responsibility, so since the start of the pandemic, we’ve formed important partnerships with WHO, global health organisations, health authorities and others. The WHO prequalification of one of our COVID-19 treatment options is just one of the many ways in which we are collaborating to expedite access to care. We are also providing one of our COVID-19 medicines to WHO and partners to distribute to low- and middle-income countries in line with public health needs.”

“Observing the rapid emergence of variants of concern, it became clear that approaches that can benefit people, regardless of which variant they are infected with, were required to meet global needs. In particular, treatment options for the severely ill would continue to be important to reduce the burden on hospitals.”

“In the northern hemisphere, the winter season brought new challenges as influenza and COVID-19 spread through communities at the same time, further increasing pressure on hospitals. This highlighted the need for doctors to be equipped with tools that can quickly diagnose people, provide the correct course of treatment and ultimately prevent further spread in the community.”

"Access and innovation have to go hand in hand, but how can we do this in a sustainable way? At Roche, we will invest more in research and development, price responsibly, find ways to reduce the cost of illness overall to support sustainable healthcare systems, and work to address the root causes behind inadequate access in every country in the world. This is a shared responsibility, which involves private and public sectors working together, challenging the status quo and driving change."

“This pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it. It is in our hands. We have all the tools we need – effective public health tools and effective medical tools. No country can end the pandemic in isolation from the rest of the world and no country can protect the health of its own without protecting the health of all people.”

"Over the past two years, we have heavily invested in innovative solutions to track, monitor and help minimise the impact of COVID-19. Ensuring equitable access to our tests has remained our number one priority and we continue to work with our global partners to achieve this. We have also expanded our Global Access Programme to make one of our COVID-19 tests available to, and affordable for, people in low- and middle-income countries."

"We have made great strides in understanding the infectivity and transmissibility of COVID-19, but we still have a lot to learn. There is hope that these learnings will inform the global approach to future pandemics. For example, the record low levels of circulating influenza due to lockdowns and social distancing measures during this past winter season show that these measures can save lives and are effective at keeping airborne viral infections at bay."

"The tools and technologies we’ve used during the pandemic may forever change our approach to managing the journey of people in the healthcare system. In some countries, people are familiar with tracking their symptoms on mobile apps, being notified when they’ve come into contact with someone who’s tested positive for COVID-19, having online doctor’s appointments and receiving test results via text. While these solutions existed pre-pandemic, their use on a wider scale has accelerated innovation in digital healthcare technology and how we engage with our health data and healthcare systems."

"We needed to understand the impact of these mutations on the virus’s ability to spread between people, and whether this might cause different, or more severe, symptoms. Once again, clinical trials were swiftly initiated to understand whether the available treatments and vaccines, or those in development, were still able to combat these viral variants, and testing became more important than ever to track the global spread of variants."

"While the vaccination roll-out brings hope to many, the ongoing emergence of COVID-19 variants highlights the importance of sensitive tests that can help healthcare systems monitor emerging mutations. We are constantly ensuring that our tests are able to detect new viral variants with accuracy and reliability. As some mutations may cause the virus to spread more rapidly; this brings an urgent need to process more patient samples faster, so people can be diagnosed earlier, and breakouts are effectively controlled."

"At a time when most of Europe was in the grip of another wave of infections, the emergence of new variants once again increased the need for mass testing. We worked with academic institutions and healthcare offices to ensure that our tests were available in countries with the greatest need at the time. We also partnered with Moderna to include our antibody tests in their ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials. These tests were crucial to helping us understand how the immune system reacts to the vaccine."

"One of the challenges that academics and clinicians face during the pandemic is explaining why we often see mixed results for treatments in different clinical trials. There are often key distinctions in the design of these trials: how many patients are enrolled? How severe are their symptoms? Which COVID-19 variant are they infected with? Is the trial designed to study only one treatment, or multiple treatments, or combinations of those treatments? This is by no means an exhaustive list of considerations, so trying to determine whether a treatment is effective in these different settings is extraordinarily challenging, and contrasting findings highlight that more research is needed to understand the pathology of this complex disease."

"We must acknowledge that this pandemic has placed an immense strain on healthcare professionals around the world, who have had to make incredibly difficult decisions in the context of limited information. Conducting randomised clinical trials in such a rapid manner was very challenging but led to significant advances which improved patient care. As more care options become available for use, the hope is that this will ease the pressure on healthcare systems by providing patients and doctors with more solutions to save lives."

"As COVID-19 evolved, it was clear that a multi-pronged approach including vaccines, testing, and multiple treatments, was needed to combat this virus and keep people from being hospitalised. To this end, Roche launched a rapid antigen laboratory test that is conducted close to where a person is receiving care to help determine whether they are currently infected with COVID-19, so that they can take the necessary steps to reduce the spread of disease."

"We had to tackle the situation on multiple levels: One single approach would not match the challenges posed by this pandemic. It was vital to develop the appropriate diagnostic tools to stem the spread of the disease, and to inform the best treatment approaches. In addition, we worked hand in hand with regulatory bodies around the world to get timely approval to support mass testing."

“We had already invested considerable efforts toward developing new treatments for people infected with COVID-19. However, scientific advances were now showing us additional ways to intercept the virus. We realised that our research, development and manufacturing strengths might help bring these more advanced options to people around the world faster. With this in mind, we partnered with Regeneron to develop and supply another treatment option that was in clinical trials."

"Through ongoing knowledge sharing on a global scale between clinicians, researchers and industry, our understanding of COVID-19 improved. This facilitated a more proactive approach and led to unprecedented progress in testing and treatment development – not to mention the speed with which vaccines were brought forward."

"The development of tests that can rapidly check for a SARS-CoV-2 infection across large groups of people was key to helping countries manage and track the virus through testing programmes. Through faster diagnosis, doctors were able to make quick and meaningful decisions for their patients."

"Our experience from the SARS pandemic and HIV epidemic taught us that working together was the only way to effectively respond to the urgent public health need. However, I have never seen such rapid mobilisation and collaboration between industry, academia and governments take place on this global scale. To think that so many well-designed clinical trials were initiated within months of the pandemic becoming a reality is extraordinary for a process that would normally take years."

"In the early stages of the pandemic, the global medical community had a very limited understanding of the disease and how to treat it. Frontline healthcare professionals worked with urgency to understand and establish care options, particularly for people who were severely ill."

"Once we were notified that one of our therapies was being used off-label to treat people with severe COVID-19 in China, with promising results, we immediately ramped up manufacturing and a large global development programme to rigorously assess the potential benefit of this therapy in this setting."

"It was clear early on that this was a novel coronavirus and no existing tests could accurately diagnose it. We began referring to this virus as SARS-CoV-2, as it closely resembles the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus we saw in 2002. Given the severity of the 2002 SARS outbreak, we knew we had to do everything possible to help. As soon as our pandemic tracking team became aware of the virus in late 2019, our scientists worked with extraordinary speed to develop tests to help detect the virus and enable clinicians to effectively diagnose people with COVID-19 - the disease caused by the virus."