Years into a global pandemic, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and affiliated world leaders have called for fair, shared-based financing of approximately $23 billion in 2022 to overcome inequalities in medical access, scale-up countermeasure efforts, and end the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the partnership of agencies making up the accelerator, a significant portion of the global population is still unable to get vaccinated, tested, or treated, notably in low and middle-income countries. Only 10 percent of those in low-income countries have received even a single vaccine dose. As a result, the organization called for $16 billion in grant funding from various governments to fund the ACT-Accelerator agencies, along with an additional $6.8 billion for in-country delivery costs. This would help move tests, treatments, vaccines, and personal protective equipment to countries in need.
To overcome this, the ACT-Accelerator Facilitation Council’s Finance and Resource Mobilization Working Group – chaired by Norway – has laid out a new financing framework based on fair share requests for richer countries to contribute to global response. These requests would be calculated based on the size of each country’s national economy and their potential gains from a faster global economic recovery.
“The rapid spread of Omicron makes it even more urgent to ensure tests, treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably globally,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said. “If higher-income countries pay their fair share of the ACT-Accelerator costs, the partnership can support low- and middle-income countries to overcome low COVID-19 vaccination levels, weak testing, and medicine shortages. 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.”
The ACT-Accelerator noted that, despite more than 4.7 billion COVID-19 tests having been administered globally, only about 22 million (0.4 percent) have been administered to low-income countries, leaving the door open to significantly more death and the emergence of new, more dangerous variants before the pandemic is over. By closing the $16 billion funding gap instead, it added that the global economy could prevent losing almost four times as much with each month of delay.
This money would also help provide 600 million doses of vaccines, 700 million tests, and 120 million patient treatments, expand sequencing capacity, better protect health workers with product rollout, and support clinical trials for treatments and vaccines, including for broadly protective coronavirus vaccines and new variants of concern.
The ACT-Accelerator hopes to gain the grain funding immediately to put it to use before September 2022.