Thank you very much for the remarks. Indeed we are quite proud that together over the past 20 years we have saved 44 million lives. It's quite remarkable and humbling.
You're right that COVID-19 has been a shock for everybody—for countries, rich and poor alike, and for organizations and partners like the Global Fund. There are a lot of lessons to be learned. In a way, we were challenged but also lucky enough to be developing our new strategy for the next six years in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were learning literally by the day and feeding the new strategy through all of those lessons that we were learning.
The new strategy reflects all of that, including the importance of community and people-centred health services. We've learned that very much through COVID-19. Without the communities on the front line and the community health workers on the front line, it's very difficult to fight a pandemic, whether this is an old pandemic like tuberculosis or a new pandemic like COVID-19. Communities and people are much more at the centre of the new strategy.
It's similar with equity. We've learned that no one is safe until everyone is safe. The most efficient way to respond to COVID was actually also the most equitable way to respond to COVID globally. We couldn't fix it somewhere and let it go somewhere else. Equity was very much at the centre of what we learned through the COVID-19 response and at the heart of the strategy.
In terms of innovation, we have also the ambition of being much faster at developing and scaling up the introduction of new products in the fight against HIV, TB and malaria. We've seen how transformative that can be and how fast that can be. When there is the political commitment, when there are various investments, and when there is a “burning platform”, as has been the case for COVID, innovation can be extremely fast and extremely transformative and just save lives. We will be investing much more in that space to accelerate progress on HIV, TB and malaria.