The WHO yesterday urged rich countries to pay their fair share of the money needed for its plan to conquer COVID-19 by contributing US$16 billion as a matter of urgency.
The rapid cash injection into its Access to COVID Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) could finish off COVID-19 as a global health emergency this year, the WHO said.
The WHO-led ACT-A is aimed at developing, producing, procuring and distributing tools to tackle the pandemic: vaccines, tests, treatments and personal protective equipment (PPE).
Photo: Reuters
ACT-A gave birth to the COVAX facility, designed to ensure that poorer countries could access eventual vaccines, correctly predicting that richer nations would hog doses coming off the production lines.
By the middle of last month, COVAX had delivered more than 1 billion vaccine doses.
ACT-A needed US$23.4 billion for its program for the year from October last year to September, but only US$800 million has so far been raised.
The scheme therefore wants US$16 billion up front from wealthy nations to “close the immediate financing gap,” with the rest to be self-funded by middle-income countries.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 made it all the more urgent to ensure that tests, treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably.
“If higher-income countries pay their fair share of the ACT-A costs, the partnership can support low and middle-income countries to overcome low COVID-19 vaccination levels, weak testing and medicine shortages,” he said in a statement. “Science gave us the tools to fight COVID-19. If they are shared globally in solidarity, we can end COVID-19 as a global health emergency this year.”
Just 0.4 percent of the 4.7 billion COVID-19 tests administered globally during the pandemic have been used in low-income countries, while only 10 percent of people in those nations have received at least one vaccine dose.
ACT-A has come up with a new “fair share” financing model on how much each of the world’s wealthy countries should contribute, based on the size of their national economy, and what they would gain from a faster recovery of the global economy and trade.
For the 2020-2021 budget, only six countries — Canada, Germany, Kuwait, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden — met or exceeded what would have been their fair share.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, cochair of the ACT-A facilitation council, said that inequitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments is prolonging the pandemic.
“I urge my fellow leaders to step up in solidarity, meet their fair shares and help reclaim our lives from this virus,” he said.
Ramaphosa and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, his fellow cochair, have written to 55 capitals — all high-income countries, G20 upper middle-income nations and two other middle-income states — outlining their “fair share” and encouraging them to pay up.
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