World leaders launch vaccine plan
US declines to participate in event
GLOBAL leaders joined the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday to launch an initiative to accelerate work on drugs, tests and vaccines to fight against Covid-19 and to share them around the world.
French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were among leaders taking part in a video conference to announce the plan, but the US stayed away.
“The world needs these tools and needs them fast,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as the virtual meeting got under way. “We are facing a common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach.”
A spokesman for the US mission in Geneva said before the meeting that the US would not be involved.
“There will be no US official participation,” he said in an email reply to a query. “We look forward to learning more about this initiative in support of international co-operation to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 as soon as possible.”
US President Donald Trump lambasted the WHO for being slow to react to the outbreak and for being “China-centric”. He announced a suspension of funding to the UN agency.
“Today is a kind of political commitment from all these partners to make sure that when we have all these new tools no one is left behind, that those who can afford vaccines or therapeutics can buy them and (put) them at the disposal of the population,” Chaib said. “It is very important to make sure that you have equitable access to quality, efficient, new tools for Covid-19,” she said.
More than 2.7 million people have been infected with the disease, which has claimed more than 190 000, according to a Reuters tally.
More than 100 potential Covid-19 vaccines are being developed, including six already in clinical trials, said Dr Seth Berkley, the chief executive of the GAVI vaccine alliance, a publicprivate partnership that leads immunisation campaigns in poor countries.
“We need to ensure that there are enough vaccines for everyone, we are going to need global leadership to identify and prioritise vaccine candidates,” he told a separate Geneva news briefing before taking part in the announcement.
Global manufacturing capacity must be ramped up before choosing “a winner” vaccine, Berkley said.
“We can’t have a repeat of what happened in 2009, the H1N1 vaccine, when there was not enough supply for developing countries or when supply did come it came much later,” he said.
Another important question was how well a vaccine would work in people most at risk from Covid-19.
“How well do they work in the elderly, are they single or multiple dose?” he said, noting that older people had weaker immune systems. |