EX-LEADERS WANT U.S. TO COMMIT $5B FOR COVID AID
Summit aimed at reinvigorating global pandemic response
A group of former heads of state and Nobel laureates are calling on the United States to immediately commit $5 billion to combat the global coronavirus pandemic, and activists are pressing President Joe Biden to take a more forceful leadership role in the response as he convenes world leaders for a COVID-19 summit Thursday.
“I want America to recognize that the disease is not over anywhere until it’s over everywhere,” Gordon Brown, a former British prime minister, who is leading the push for funding, said Monday. “We must not sleepwalk into the next variant.”
But Biden conceded Monday afternoon that “much-needed funding” for the COVID-19 response is not coming anytime soon. In a statement issued by the White House, the president said congressional leaders in both parties had informed him that including the funding in a new aid package for Ukraine would “slow down action on the urgently needed Ukrainian aid,” so he was resigned to having the two packages move separately.
Biden has asked Congress to authorize $22.5 billion in emergency coronavirus aid, including $5 billion for the global pandemic, but the request has stalled on Capitol Hill. A compromise proposal for $10 billion in emergency aid includes no money for the global response, meaning Biden will almost certainly arrive at his own summit empty-handed. Brown said that his appeal is intended to place pressure on Congress to release the funds.
The summit, a virtual gathering that will be hosted by Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal, is aimed at reinvigorating the global response. The need is urgent: The drive to vaccinate the world is losing steam. Testing has plummeted around the globe. And efforts to bring tests and COVID-19 antiviral pills to low- and middle- income nations are stalled, running into obstacles that recall battles fought 20 years ago around HIV.
A White House spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said Monday that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would use the summit to “rally the world around the continued, urgent needs we have to fight COVID-19 globally and prepare for future pandemics as we continue to see lives lost and the proliferation of new variants.”
Brown, now the World Health Organization’s ambassador for global health financing, said he was also encouraging leaders of other wealthy nations to make funding commitments. He is the lead author on a letter to the president whose signatories also include Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland; Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand; and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
“Mr. President — your leadership can revive the global COVID-19 response,” they wrote, adding that “our wholehearted hope is that your administration will step up to provide leadership on financing the global response, encouraging other countries to follow you, as is both urgent and necessary to help save lives across the world.”
Global health officials are increasingly concerned about what many are calling “COVID fatigue,” as world leaders deal with crises like the war in Ukraine, or turn to other pressing health concerns.
The summit is a follow-up to one Biden convened in
September; he will use the gathering to ask wealthy nations to step up their financial contributions for vaccines, tests and treatments. Specifically, he will call on developed nations to donate $2 billion to purchase COVID-19 treatments and $1 billion to purchase oxygen supplies for low- and middle-income countries, according to a senior administration official involved with the planning.
The United States, working with international organizations, has donated more vaccine doses than any other nation to the global vaccination effort. Biden has pledged 1.2 billion doses to other nations; as of Monday, more than 539 million had been shipped, according to the State Department.