The World Health Organization-led initiative, Access to COVID19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator) set up in April to expedite the quest for a cure for the pandemic is urging government and private sector contributors to help it raise $31.3 billion in the next 12 months to develop and deliver tests, treatments and vaccines for the disease.
Contributions worth $3.4 billion had been made to date, leaving a funding gap of $27.9 billion, of which $13.7 billion is “urgently needed”, WHO asserted.
Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator initiative unites and collaborates with governments, scientists, health organizations, businesses, philanthropists and civil society to speed up efforts to end the pandemic by supporting the development and equitable distribution of the diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments the world needs.
The Access to #COVID19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator) will end the pandemic faster by ensuring that the tools developed are allocated rationally & equitably around the world, maximizing the chances of global success of finally ending the pandemic https://t.co/NWeTpT4NvP
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) June 26, 2020
WHO-led members work across four pillars:
- Diagnostics,
- Therapeutics,
- Vaccines, and
- “The health system connector” as referred by the team
The statement said that 500 million COVID-19 tests are expected to be developed and delivered by the team along with 245 million courses of a new treatment for the disease to low- and middle-income countries by mid-2021.
The initiative is also looking forward to having 2 billion vaccine doses, including 1 billion to be bought by low- and middle-income countries, available by the end of 2021.
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’S chief scientist, replied to a question said that the British-Swedish pharma company AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate is probably “the world’s leading candidate and most advanced in terms of development.
“They’ve already advanced into phase two, and we expect to see results very soon from those human studies and are already planning phase three trials in many countries. And so it’s possible that it will have results, quite early.” Dr. Swaminathan remarked.
It was also updated that the ACT accelerator’ss vaccines development arm Covax, has set the goal of ending the acute phase of the pandemic by the end of 2021. To do that, the team needed total funding of $18.1 billion for 2020/2021, of which $2.4 billion will be allocated for R&D, $1.7 billion for technology transfer and scale-up, and further $5.3 billion for at-risk manufacturing of multiple vaccine candidates.
