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A fundraising appeal to finance the Covax global corona vaccination program has exceeded expectations. The online event with governments and foundations from around the world raised an additional $2.4 billion (just under two billion euros), the Gavi vaccination initiative announced Wednesday evening in Geneva.
- Gavi is co-leading COVAX, the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator. This involves coordinating the COVAX Facility, a global risk-sharing mechanism for pooled procurement and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
That means a total of $9.6 billion is now available to carry out corona vaccination campaigns in more than 90 of the poorest countries. The initial target had been $8.3 billion. The money is enough to buy 1.8 billion vaccine doses as planned and vaccinate nearly 30 percent of people in those countries against the corona virus by early 2022, Gavi said. In addition, several countries pledged to donate an additional combined 54 million vaccine doses already purchased. This means that 132 million vaccine doses have been donated so far, according to Gavi.
Covax was actually founded last year on the initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote vaccine research and take over procurement for all countries in the world. The idea was to spread risks – such as investing in a potential vaccine that ultimately fails – across many shoulders and ensure fair global distribution of successful vaccines. But rich countries still made separate deals with vaccine manufacturers and bought up much of the production. As a result, Covax does not have enough vaccine doses to supply the poorest countries.
- source/picture: who.int
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