The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday said that 75 countries have shown interest in joining its COVAX facility meant to provide global access to a Covid-19 vaccine.

The countries would finance the vaccines from their own public finance budgets while partnering up to support 90 lower-income countries through voluntary donations to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation’s (Gavi) COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC).

“Together, this group of up to 165 countries represents more than 60 per cent of the world’s population. Among the group are representatives from every continent and more than half of the world’s G20 economies,” WHO said.

The COVAX facility is a financing scheme which is part of WHO’s COVAX initiative co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and WHO. The initiative is meant to help accelerate Covid-19 vaccine development and manufacturing along with ensuring “fair and equitable” global access to a vaccine.

Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, said: “For the vast majority of countries, whether they can afford to pay for their own doses or require assistance, it means receiving a guaranteed share of doses and avoiding being pushed to the back of the queue, as we saw during the H1N1 pandemic a decade ago. Even for those countries that are able to secure their own agreements with vaccine manufacturers, this mechanism represents, through its world-leading portfolio of vaccine candidates, a means of reducing the risks associated with individual candidates failing to show efficacy or gain licensure.”

COVAX will achieve its goal by “sharing the risks associated with vaccine development, investing in manufacturing upfront so vaccines can be deployed at scale as soon as they are proven successful, and pooling procurement and purchasing power to achieve sufficient volumes to end the acute phase of the pandemic by 2021.”

The initiative’s goal is to deliver two billion doses of safe, effective vaccines once approved by 2021.

These Covid-19 vaccines will be delivered to the countries participating in the COVAX facility in amounts that are proportional to their population. Healthcare workers will be prioritised in terms of people receiving initial access to the vaccine. The initiative will then be expanded to cover 20 per cent of the population of the participating countries.

“Further doses will then be made available based on country need, vulnerability and Covid-19 threat,” it said.

COVAX will now begin discussions with the countries. The countries that have expressed interest to finance the initiative will have to commit to purchase the vaccine doses with upfront payment by August end to secure their spot.

Significant progress has been achieved by the COVAX partners to date, with seven of the nine candidate vaccines supported by CEPI already in clinical trials.

Gavi also said that it had raised $600 million against an initial target of $2 billion from private donors under the COVAX AMC. The AMC aims at incentivising vaccine manufacturers and helping them produce sufficient quantities of approved Covid-19 vaccines to ensure access for developing countries.

WHO has also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with AstraZeneca for 300 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to be supplied to COVAX. Data from early trials of the vaccine candidate, developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is due on Monday, July 20, the Lancet Medical Journal said, as per reports.

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