Leaders of Costa Rica, Chile launch effort with WHO to create COVID-19 platform

The leaders of Costa Rica and Chile, working with the World Health Organization (WHO), are spearheading an effort to create a technology platform that aims to lift access barriers to effective vaccines, medicines, and other health products against COVID-19.

“Our proposal relies on solidarity,” President Carlos Alvarado Quesada of Costa Rica said. “It’s a solidarity call to action to Member States, to academia, to companies, research institutions, and cooperation agencies, based on global social responsibility, on a voluntary basis, promoting more global nonexclusive voluntary licensing.”

Costa Rica initially proposed the idea at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Since then, several countries have supported the proposal, including Chile.

“Chile, like most countries in the international community, considers that only through international cooperation is it possible to emerge victorious from the crisis caused by COVID-19,” said Ambassador Cristian Streeter, director of multilateral policy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaking on behalf of President Piñera of Chile.

The platform will pool data, knowledge, and intellectual property for existing or new COVID-19 health products to deliver ‘global public goods’ for people of all countries. Through this open sharing of data, numerous companies will be able to access the information they need to produce the technologies.

“We need to unleash the full power of science, without caveats or restrictions, to deliver innovations that are scalable, usable, and benefit everyone, everywhere, at the same time,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Traditional market models will not deliver at the scale needed to cover the entire globe. Solidarity within and between countries and the private sector is essential if we are to overcome these difficult times.”

WHO and Costa Rica will officially launch the platform on May 29, when a Solidarity Call to Action will be published on WHO’s website. This is where governments, research and development funders, institutions, and companies can express their support. The solidarity of all of WHO’s Member States will be critical to ensuring the technology platform can be an important tool for access to COVID-19 health products, they said.