World leaders pledge billions of dollars for virtual vaccine summit

World leaders came together in a virtual online summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate, but highlighted from Washington its “whole-of-America” efforts underway in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

The conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to massproduce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus that has killed nearly 250,000 people worldwide.

With the money came soaring rhetoric about international solidarity, and a good bit of boasting about each country’s efforts and achievements, live and prerecorded, by Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Japan’s Shinzo Abe — alongside Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

“The more we pull together and share our expertise, the faster our scientists will succeed,” said Johnson, who was so stricken by the virus that he thought he might never leave the intensive care unit alive last month. “The race to discover the vaccine to defeat this virus is not a competition between countries but the most urgent shared endeavor of our lifetimes.”

A senior Trump administration official said Monday the United States “welcomes” the efforts of the conference participants. He did not explain why the United States did not join them.

“Many of the organizations and programs this pledging conference seeks to support already receive very significant funding and support from the U.S. government and private sector,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under State Department rules for briefing reporters. Public health officials and researchers expressed surprise.

“It’s the first time that I can think of where you have had a major international pledging conference for a global crisis of this kind of importance and the U.S. is just absent,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the Ebola response in the Obama administration.

University of Oxford via AP In this screen grab from video issued by Britain’s Oxford University, a volunteer is injected with either an experimental COVID-19 vaccine or a comparison shot as part of the first human trials in the U.K. to test a potential vaccine, led by Oxford University in England on April 25. About 100 research groups around the world are pursuing vaccines against the coronavirus, with nearly a dozen in early stages of human trials or poised to start.