World leaders launch plan to speed up COVID-19 drugs, vaccine

GENEVA: World leaders pledged to accelerate work on tests, drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 and to share them around the globe. However, the United States did not take part in the launch of the World Health Organisation (WHO) initiative.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were among those who joined a video conference to launch what the WHO billed as a ‘landmark collaboration’ to fight the pandemic.

The aim is to speed up the development of safe and effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent, diagnose and treat COVID-19 and ensure equal access to treatments for rich and poor.

“We are facing a common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as he opened the virtual meeting. “Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”

The meeting also discussed that distribution of vaccines should be equitable as wealthier countries were able to purchase more as observed during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009.

“We must make sure that people who need them get them,” said Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund to Fight on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. “The lessons from AIDS must be learned. Too many millions died before anti-retroviral medicines were made widely accessible.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the objective at a global pledging effort on May 4 would be to raise 7.5 billion euros to ramp up work on prevention, diagnostics and treatment.

Several leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the Americas also joined the video conference but several big countries did not participate including China, India and Russia. US President Donald Trump has criticised the WHO as being slow to react to the outbreak and suspended funding.

Tedros has defended the WHO’s handling of the pandemic and committed to conducting a post-evaluation. Macron, Merkel, Ramaphosa, and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez were among those voicing strong support to WHO.

Macron urged all G7 and G20 countries, including US and China, to get behind the initiative saying “the fight against COVID-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.” Merkel said the initiative concerns a global public good to produce this vaccine and to distribute it in all parts of the world.

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said: “As new diagnostics, treatments and vaccines become available, we have a responsibility to get them out equitably with the understanding that all lives have equal value.”

More than 100 potential COVID-19 vaccines are being developed, including six already in clinical trials, said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, a public-private 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 Geneva news briefing.