The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday appealed to 55 of the world’s richest nations to raise $23billion in funding to boost efforts and end the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency, reported Al Jazeera.
According to the WHO, the money raised will be used to fund the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator programme, a global initiative set up to develop and distribute test kits, treatments and vaccines.
“Supporting the rollout of tools to fight COVID-19 globally will help to curb virus transmission, break the cycle of variants, relieve overburdened health workers and systems, and save lives,” the international health body said in a statement.
It warned that the global economy loses almost four times the investment the ACT-Accelerator programme needs with every month of delay.
The WHO highlighted the inequalities in access to COVID-19 tools, noting that only 10 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose as compared to 68 percent coverage in richer countries. As per the data, only 22 million of the 4.7 billion COVID-19 tests that have been administered globally were carried out in low-income countries, which is 0.4 percent of the total.
In a recent press briefing, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s epidemiologist and technical lead on Covid-19 warned that the coronavirus pandemic is far from over and that future variants will be more transmissible as compared to the current variants.
“The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,” Dr. Van Kerkhove said.
The WHO official further warned that the future variant could evade immunity more easily, making current vaccines less effective. However, she stressed the importance of getting the vaccine as it protects against severe illness and death, as exhibited during the Omicron wave.
