WHO and Norway call on G20 to commit to ending COVID-19 pandemic

The World Health Organisation and Norway’s prime minister called on Thursday on G20 leaders meeting in Rome this weekend to use their financial and political power to fund the ACT Accelerator programme’s latest $23.4 billion plan to end COVID-19.

“I hope and urge that the G20 will make a commitment to end the pandemic,” Jonas Gahr Stoere, prime minister of Norway, which co-chairs the ACT Accelerator’s Facilitation Council which leads fundraising, told a WHO media briefing.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the G20 should fully fund the latest round of the programme which aims to provide vaccines, drugs and tests to the poorest countries until September 2022.

The latest update of the so-called Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), until September 2022, is expected to include use of an experimental oral antiviral pill made by Merck & Co for treating mild and moderate cases.

If the pill is approved by regulatory authorities, the cost could be as little as $10 per course, the plan said, in line with a draft document seen by Reuters earlier this month.

BOOSTER VACCINES

COVAX, the vaccines arm of the ACT-A, has delivered some 400 million COVID-19 doses to more than 140 low- and middle-income countries, where vaccination rates remain low, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said.

About 82 countries are likely to miss a WHO global target of 40% vaccination coverage by year-end, but some of them could if supplies start flowing, she said.

“One of the things that is now interfering in a big way is the need for boosters, more and more high-income countries are going in for the booster doses and this is now sucking up the vaccine doses as well,” Swaminathan added.

Nearly a million booster vaccines are being given each day,” three times the amount of vaccines being administered in low-income countries,” she said.

Referring to India, which resumed “relatively modest” COVID-19 vaccine exports this month after suspending them in April due to its domestic epidemic, Swaminathan said: “I think these volumes coming out of India will go up significantly.”