At the height of the first wave of the pandemic in April this year, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator was set up by leading global health organisations, multilaterals and philanthropic foundations to coordinate and facilitate the development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. The ACT Accelerator is organised into four pillars of work:
- Diagnostics (led by the Global Fund and FIND);
- Treatments (led by Wellcome Trust and Unitaid);
- Vaccines (led by WHO, CEPI, Gavi);
- Health systems strengthening (led by the World Bank and the Global Fund).
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has twenty years’ experience of providing access to infectious disease immunisation to half of the world’s children through sharing the cost of vaccines for developing countries. In the context of the current pandemic, the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) mechanism will make COVID-19 vaccines available to low- and middle-income countries. So far, more than 180 countries have committed their participation, including 94 self-funding high-income countries. The COVAX AMC Facility will fund volume guarantees to vaccines manufacturers even before they are approved. After the vaccines are licensed and prequalified by the World Health Organization, the funds will pay for the purchase of doses for all 92 countries eligible for official development assistance, thus ensuring that half of the world population living in these countries will have equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.
This month marked a breakthrough moment when Gavi achieved its goal of raising US$ 2 billion by the end of 2020. Heads of governments and international organisations attending the Paris Peace Forum on 11-13 November 2020, pledged a further US$ 350m—including donations by the European Commission (US$ 120m), France (US$ 120m), Spain (US$ 60m) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (US$ 50m). The funding raised so far will provide access to 1 billion doses for AMC-eligible countries; it is estimated that at least US$ 5 billion more will be needed in 2021 to procure doses as more vaccines become available.
For more information see our COVID-19 Health Funding Tracker.
For all our blog posts, see our COVID-19 Health Funding Tracker News Feed.
