By Kemo Cham
The Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization (GAVI) said it has secured US$2billion in funding as part of efforts to procure COVID-19 vaccines for poor nations.
GAVI is a public–private global health partnership with the goal of increasing access to immunisation in poor countries. The group helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.
As part of its mission to save lives, reduce poverty and protect the world against the threat of epidemics, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than 822 million children in the world’s poorest countries, thereby preventing more than 14 million future deaths, according to information on its website.
This announcement by GAVI comes after report by the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, last week, that its mRNA-based vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, had shown a 90 percent efficacy in initial trials. In the same week, a second breakthrough in the global fight against Covid-19 was announced by another firm, Moderna, saying its vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, had shown a 95 percent efficacy.
GAVI, in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), had set up a facility called COVAX to raise funding to secure vaccines against the viral pandemic for poor nations.
The COVAX is the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, which is a global risk-sharing mechanism for pooled procurement and equitable distribution of eventual COVID-19 vaccines.
An official of the Alliance was quoted by Reuters News last week saying that they had exceeded an interim target of raising more than $2 billion to buy and distribute the COVID-19 shots for poorer countries.
The Funds for an Advance Market Commitment (AMC) will allow the COVAX facility to buy an initial one billion vaccine doses for 92 eligible countries which would not otherwise be able to afford them, the official said.
Sierra Leone has been a beneficiary country of GAVI’s intervention.
“We’ve seen sovereign and private donors from across the world dig deep and meet this target and help ensure that every country will get access to COVID vaccines, not just the wealthy few,” the Chief Executive Office of GAVI, Seth Berkley, told reporters.
He added that there was an “urgent need” to also finance treatments and diagnostics.
According to the Reuters report, the European Commission, France, Spain, South Korea, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among many other international funders, had in recent weeks pledged another $360 million to the AMC, bringing the total funding to over the $2 billion target for 2020.
It added that another $5 billion will be needed in 2021 to procure COVID-19 vaccine doses as they come through development and are approved by regulators.
Both Pfizer and Moderna are US-based companies. News about their breakthrough raised hopes in the US about efforts to contain the viral disease which is ravaging the world’s superpower.
US President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic has been blamed for the worsening situation, which has led to the death of over 200, 000 Americans, among over 11 million cases.
The announcement of the successful trials of the Covid-19 vaccines is seen as welcome development, especially coming as the US is poised to change government following the election of former vice president Joe Biden.
GAVI’s Berkley was quoted welcoming the election of Mr Biden, noting that he planned to hold talks with the Covid-19 team of the president-elect.
“It’s positive that the incoming administration has already established a COVID-19 task force filled with many scientists we know are believers in science and moving this forward,” the GAVI chief said.
“The U.S. is already one of GAVI’s biggest supporters, they care enormously about vaccines for the developing world. And I suspect that we will have continuing conversations about how we can collaborate with them,” he added.
Berkley said $5.3 billion was also still needed for diagnostics and $6.1 billion for therapeutics by the end of 2021.
“We continue to advance negotiations with a number of manufacturers in addition to those we’ve already announced who share our vision of fair and equitable distribution of vaccines,” he said.
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