By CGTN Africa
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres was among world leaders calling for 23 billion U.S. dollars to make COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments available to everyone worldwide.
Guterres says that vaccine inequity is “the biggest moral failure of our times – and people are paying the price”.
The money would be used to fund The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a groundbreaking global collaboration to accelerate development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. The ACT-Accelerator was established in April 2020, just weeks after the pandemic was declared, to speed up development and access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. The global vaccine solidarity initiative COVAX is one of its four pillars.
The campaign launched on Wednesday aims to meet a 16 billion U.S. dollar financing gap, and nearly 7 billion for in-country delivery costs, in the bid to end the pandemic as a global emergency this year.
The funding will help to curb coronavirus transmission, break the cycle of variants, relieve overburdened health workers and systems, and save lives, world leaders said, warning that with every month of delay, the global economy stands to lose almost four times the investment the ACT-Accelerator needs.
Financing will be used to procure and provide lifesaving tools, and personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers, to low and middle-income countries.
It will support measures that include driving vaccine rollouts, creating a Pandemic Vaccine Pool of 600 million doses, purchasing 700 million tests, procuring treatments for 120 million patients, and 100 percent of the oxygen needs of low-income countries.
The co-chairs of the ACT-Accelerator Facilitation Council, which provides high-level political leadership to advocate for resource mobilization, recently wrote to more than 50 rich countries to encourage “fair share” contributions.
The financing framework is calculated on the size of their national economies and what they would gain from a faster global economic and trade recovery.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that the rapid spread of the Omicron variant has underlined the urgent need to ensure tests, treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably globally.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Original article published by UN News
