Vaccine alliance Gavi says that additional $5.2bn needed to ensure supply
pharmafile | January 20, 2022 | News story | Business Services |
The chairman of the Gavi vaccine alliance, Jose Manuel Barroso, has said that an additional $5.2 billion is required to continue to deliver vaccines at scale, according to Reuters.
Barosso shared that it is critical to continue to keep up the pace of vaccine supply through the COVAX global vaccine-sharing programme, as over three billion people are still yet to receive their first dose.
Gavi Chief Executive, Seth Berkley, said there was a need to raise the additional funds in the next three months to establish a minimum of 600 million additional doses, strengthen the delivery systems in various countries, and finance ancillary costs for syringes and transport.
“If we achieve this goal, we believe that up to one and a quarter million deaths can be prevented in the next year alone… economic cost of the pandemic could be reduced.”
Last week, COVAX reached a milestone of delivering one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses. Its billionth dose was delivered to Rwanda. The company expressed expectations to ship its next billion donated doses in the next four to five months. Seth Berkley has also warned that demand for vaccines, adapted to new variants such as Omicron, may in fact undo the progress achieved so far in ensuring fairer access to vaccines across the world.
“I’m a little worried, frankly, if there are new variant vaccines that we might have an Inequity 2.0,” Berkley told a panel discussion at the Davos Agenda.
WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also said that scaling up the delivery of COVAX will be instrumental in meeting the UN’s target of vaccinating 70% of the population in poorer nations by mid-2022.
Lina Adams
