United States to contribute $ 4 billion to Covax global vaccination program

President Joe Biden pledges $ 4 billion in US aid to global Covax-19 vaccination program at the request of the World Health Organization (WHO), during its virtual meeting with other G7 leaders on Friday, White House officials reported.

An initial amount of $ 2 billion will be delivered “at the end of this month,” with the remainder paid over the next two years, a senior White House official said on Thursday, who asked not to be identified. . “This pandemic will only end if we end it globally”he added.

The United States joined the WHO Covax platform at the end of January, created to promote equitable access to covid-19 vaccines, and has now decided to issue a challenge to the world’s major economies. to stimulate efforts to distribute them around the world.

To this end, the US government will provide “immediately” over the next month $ 2,000 million to the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, which participates in COVAX and seeks to increase access to the anticovid vaccine in 92 developing economy countriesexplained the American official.

The United States plans to donate an additional $ 2 billion to this initiative in 2021 and 2022, and will pay out the first 500 million of this second tranche “Once the donations they have already pledged (to other countries) are delivered and the first doses distributed” to developing countries, the White House said.

Also, during the summit this Friday, Biden to call on the world’s major economies, gathered in the G7, to follow his lead and “contribute billions of dollars more in resources to support the global covid-19 vaccination campaign”the White House added in a statement sent to the agency. EFE.

The GAVI alliance warned in November that it must raise an additional $ 5 billion in 2021 to continue the Covax program, after raising an initial $ 2 billion last year to fund access to $ 2 billion. vaccine doses.

The White House is confident that its $ 2 billion donation and pledge of an additional $ 2 billion will motivate other countries to increase their contributions to the initiative, meet and exceed GAVI’s $ 5 billion target as soon as possible.

“We believe that at least $ 15 billion is likely to be needed to actually increase the world’s vaccine supply and (improve) distribution systems,” the official said.

The United States, the country most affected by the pandemic in absolute terms, with more than 27.8 million infections and 492,000 deaths, also you “plan to give” directly your surplus vaccine once you have received the doses you feel are sufficient to inoculate your entire population, the source said.

The doctor Anthony Fauci, the chief epidemiologist for the United States government, has updated his predictions on when the population could “return to normal.”

“Hopefully by the time we start moving into 2022, we really have a degree of normalcy that comes close to the kind of normalcy we’ve been used to,” Fauci said in a recent interview with the LA Times.

Previously, the White House adviser on the pandemic had calculated the return to “normality” for fall 2021 in the United States, that is, between September and December of this year. However, his analysis of how circumstances have changed since then made him consider other delays.

Fauci, who is also the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said the shift in perspective is clear from the current pace of the vaccination campaign and the global emergence of different strains of the virus, all present in the United States. . .

With information from EFE

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