World Health Organization chief pleads for investment in ACT-Accelerator programme that aims to beat Covid-19

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says cost is ‘tiny fraction’ compared to pouring trillions into stimulus packages as pandemic ravages world economy

THE WHO on Thursday urged countries to in-vest billions of dollars in searching for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments – call-ing it a snip compared to the vast economic cost of the coronavirus crisis.

The World Health Organiza-tion insisted it was a smarter bet than the trillions of dollars being thrown at handling the conse-quences of the global pandemic.

The UN agency’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded for investment into the WHO-led ACT-Accelerator programme, which aims to share global re-search and development, manu-facturing and procurement in a bid to beat Covid-19.

Citing the International Mon-etary  Fund’s  predictions  of  the  pandemic  wiping  out  US$12  tril-lion over two years, he urged coun-tries to spend on shared solutions.

“It’s the best economic stimu-lus the world can invest in,” Tedros told a virtual press conference.

Funding the ACT-Accelerator, with US$31.3 billion needed imme-diately, “will cost a tiny fraction in comparison to the alternative, where economies retract further and require continued fiscal stim-ulus packages”.

He said spreading the risk and sharing the reward is a better bet than the option some coun-tries have taken, of going it alone in backing one of the dozens of vaccines in development.

“The development of vaccines is long, complex, risky and expen-sive,” he said. “The vast majority of vaccines in early development fail.”

Tedros said multiple vaccine candidates, of different types, were needed to identify the best one.

Russia on Tuesday declared itself the first country to approve a vaccine, even though final stage testing involving more than 2,000 people was only due to start on Wednesday.

Bruce Aylward, who heads up the ACT-Accelerator, said the WHO was still awaiting more de-tails from Moscow.

“We’re currently in conversa-tion with Russia to get additional information, understand the sta-tus of that product, the trials that have been undertaken, and then what the next steps might be,” he said.

The WHO says 168 candi-date vaccines are being worked on around the world, of which 28 have progressed to being tested on humans. Nine of those 28 – not including the Russian vaccine – are in the ACT-Accelerator pro-gramme.

WHO access to medicines chief Mariangela Simao said that with so many vaccine candidates being worked on, backing just one or two could not be the best bet.“We don’t know which one will be the front-runner, which one will actually prove to be safe and effective,” she said.

“We are encouraging coun-tries to join a global facility, be-cause you will have access to more candidates, and you have a better chance to have concrete access ... to procure one of the successful candidates.

”The European Union said earlier on Thursday that it has reserved up to 400 million doses of a potential new coronavirus vac-cine being developed by US giant Johnson & Johnson. On July 31, the European Commission said it had reserved 300 million doses of another potential vaccine being developed by French firm Sanofi.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 750,000 people and infected more than 20.7 million worldwide since it first emerged in China in December, according to a tally by Johns Hop-kins University.

WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan warned that only a small proportion of the global pop-ulation had actually been exposed to the virus.

“This virus has a long way to burn, if we allow it,” he said. “The vast majority of people remain susceptible to this infection. We may be in the eye of the storm and we don’t know it.”

Meanwhile Maria Van Kerk-hove, the WHO’s Covid-19 techni-cal lead, said there were examples from some countries suggesting that an individual may have been reinfected by the virus, but “it’s still not confirmed”. She said experts would need to look for false positive or negative cases, immune response after infection, and sequencing.

SOURCE:  AFP

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