In 1988, Brazilian Constitution definedhealth as a universal right and state responsibility. Progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) has been achieved through a Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS) which was created in 1990. With successes and setbacks in the implementation of health programmes and organization of its health system, Brazil has achieved nearly-universal access to health services for her citizens. The trajectory of the development and expansion of the SUS offers valuable lessons on how to scale UHC in a health system in a highly-unequal country and relatively low resources. The analysis of the 30 years since the inception of SUS shows that innovations in the Brazilian health system extend beyond the development of new models of care and highlights the importance of establishing political, legal, organizational and management-related structures, and the role of the federal and local governments in the governance, planning, financing, and provision of health services. The expansion of SUS has allowed Brazil to rapidly address the changing health needs, with dramatic scaling up health service coverage in just three decades. However, despite its successes, analysis of future scenarios suggests the urgent need to address lingering geographic inequalities, insufficient funding, and the suboptimal private-public collaboration. Recent fiscal policies that ushered austerity measures, environmental, educational and health policies of the new administraion introduced in Brazil could reverse the hard-earned achievements of the SUS and threaten its sustainability and its ability to fulfil its constitutional mandate of providing 'health for all'. 2000 2010 2015 Births attended by skilled health staff (% of total) 87•6 98•6 98•9 99•1 Immunization, BCG (% of one-year-old children) 79 99 99 99 Immunization, measles (% of children ages 12-23 months) 78 99 99 96 Immunization, DPT (% of children ages 12-23 months) 66 98 99 96 Immunization, Hib3 (% of children ages 12-23 months) 90 99 96 Immunization, Pol3 (% of one-year-old children) 58 99 99 98 Immunization, HepB3 (% of one-year-old children) 94 96 96 Antiretroviral therapy coverage (% people living with HIV) 27 38 57

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Despite notable scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic and behavioural factors continue to undercut the response to the COVID-19 pandemic1,2. Here we convened, as part of this Delphi study, a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of 386 academic, health, non-governmental organization, government and other experts in COVID-19 response from 112 countries and territories to recommend specific actions to end this persistent global threat to public health. The panel developed a set of 41 consensus statements and 57 recommendations to governments, health systems, industry and other key stakeholders across six domains: communication; health systems; vaccination; prevention; treatment and care; and inequities. In the wake of nearly three years of fragmented global and national responses, it is instructive to note that three of the highest-ranked recommendations call for the adoption of whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches1, while maintaining proven prevention measures using a vaccines-plus approach2 that employs a range of public health and financial support measures to complement vaccination. Other recommendations with at least 99% combined agreement advise governments and other stakeholders to improve communication, rebuild public trust and engage communities3 in the management of pandemic responses. The findings of the study, which have been further endorsed by 184 organizations globally, include points of unanimous agreement, as well as six recommendations with >5% disagreement, that provide health and social policy actions to address inadequacies in the pandemic response and help to bring this public health threat to an end.

Two commonly used metrics for assessing progress toward universal health coverage involve assessing citizens' rights to health care and counting the number of people who are in a financial protection scheme that safeguards them from high health care payments. On these metrics most countries in Latin America have already "reached" universal health coverage. Neither metric indicates, however, whether a country has achieved universal health coverage in the now commonly accepted sense of the term: that everyone--irrespective of their ability to pay--gets the health services they need without suffering undue financial hardship. We operationalized a framework proposed by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to monitor progress under this definition and then constructed an overall index of universal health coverage achievement. We applied the approach using data from 112 household surveys from 1990 to 2013 for all twenty Latin American countries. No country has achieved a perfect universal health coverage score, but some countries (including those with more integrated health systems) fare better than others. All countries except one improved in overall universal health coverage over the time period analyzed.

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