
GEVENA, Switzerland – The World Health Organization said on Thursday that its plan to secure and deploy vaccines, tests and treatments to fight the COVID-19 pandemic was in need of $ 23.4 billion over over the next 12 months.
Funding for the WHO’s Covid Tool Access Accelerator – aimed at developing, producing, purchasing and distributing tools to combat the pandemic – would help address global inequalities during deployment.
The WHO has said that implementing its plan could help prevent at least five million potential additional deaths on top of the nearly five million already on record, according to an AFP tally from official sources.
“The ACT-Accelerator partnership of the world’s leading health agencies needs $ 23.4 billion to help countries most at risk secure and deploy COVID-19 tools by September 2022,” said the WHO in a press release.
“This figure is paltry compared to the trillions of dollars in economic losses caused by the pandemic and the cost of stimulus packages to support national recoveries,” the statement added.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “to end the pandemic, governments, manufacturers and donors must fully fund the ACT-Accelerator to address inequalities in access to vaccines, tests and COVID-19 treatments “.
âFull funding for the ACT-Accelerator is a global health security imperative for all of us – the time to act now,â he said.
WHO said its plan would see ACT-A turn to a more focused focus on solving supply shortages in the poorest countries.
“Nowhere is this inequity more apparent than on the African continent, where only eight percent of the population has received a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said.