At the United States-hosted Global COVID-19 Summit last week, world leaders recommitted to guaranteeing equitable vaccine access for all countries through COVAX, and pledged a mix of funds, doses and supply chain aid to ensure it.
“Science has made huge progress in the fight to save lives, restore the global economy, and end the pandemic,” Dr Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), said. “Now we must redress the central moral failing of the world’s response to the pandemic, which is the lack of equitable access to the life-saving tools we have developed. This will require continued investment in R&D so we are able to deploy more vaccines, more effectively and create equity between countries of all income levels with regard to access to these life-saving vaccines.”
Leading the charge was President Joe Biden, who took the opportunity to earmark another 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from the U.S. to benefit low and lower-middle-income countries through COVAX. This brings the total U.S. commitment to nearly 1.1 billion doses, with the additional doses to begin being made available in January 2022. A separate effort will take the form of more than $383 million in political risk insurance to be provided to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
Gavi, along with CEPI and the World Health Organization (WHO), is co-lead of the COVAX program, a global initiative to guarantee COVID-19 vaccines reach both high and low income nations.
At the same time, the European Union committed to share 500 million doses by mid-2022. From within that same union, Spain pledged an additional 7.5 million doses of vaccine, while Italy committed to another 30 million doses by the end of the year.
From northern Europe, Sweden committed another approximately $243 million for contributions and dose donations through 2022, building on a $285 million donation it had already pledged to the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC). Denmark pledged doses, doubling its shot commitment to 6 million. From Asia, Japan filled out the pack of new commitments with a pledge of approximately 60 million doses.
More remains to be done, though. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called on higher-income countries to begin trading places in production queues to support both the African Union and COVAX to increase coverage across Africa.
“What we need to succeed is truly sustainable, ironclad support that gets delivered now — not in 6 months or 12 months time,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said. “If we are to meet the targets we have set of vaccinating 10 percent of the population of all countries by the end of this month, 40 percent by the end of 2021 and 70 percent by mid next-year, we need to drastically scale up access to vaccines now.”