GENEVA: World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has asserted that there was a vast global gap between funds needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic and funds committed.
Addressing a press briefing today (Monday), the WHO chief said, “The coming three months present a crucial window of opportunity to scale-up the impact of the ACT Accelerator for global impact.”
“However to exploit this window, we have to fundamentally scale up the way we are funding the ACT Accelerator and prioritise the use of new tools. There is a vast global gap between our ambition for the ACT Accelerator and the amount of funds that have been committed,” he remarked.
Tedros Adhanom also pointed out that the world health body was only 10 percent of the way to fund the billions of dollars required. “For the vaccines alone, over $100 billion will be needed,” he added.
“This sounds like a lot of money and it is. However, it’s small in comparison to the $10 trillion that has already been invested by G20 countries in fiscal stimulus to deal with the consequences of the pandemic so far,” he informed.
On the occasion, head of WHO’s emergencies programme Dr. Mike Ryan said that the coronavirus was simple, brutal and cruel. “It’s brutal in its simplicity, it is brutal in its cruelty, but it doesn’t have a brain,” he remarked.
“We have brains. We can outsmart something that doesn’t have a brain but we are not doing such a great job right now,” he concluded.
According to a tally, more than 19.92 million coronavirus infections have been reported globally and almost 729,883 have died. The coronavirus cases have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories. – Agencies.