The WHO (World Health Organisation) said that the injection of rapid cash into its Access to Covid Tools Accelerator could aid in finishing off the deadly virus as a global health emergency by the end of this year.
The WHO has urges the rich nations, on Wednesday, to pay a fair share of the money required for its plan to take over the Coronavirus by contributions worth $16billion urgently. The WHO said that this rapid injection of cash flow might be able to finish off Coronavirus as a global health emergency finally in 2022.
The World Health Organisation-led ACT-A has been aiming to develop, procure, produce, and distribute tools to conquer the pandemic including vaccinations, tests, treatments, and personal protective equipment. ACT-A has also given birth to the Covax facility which is designed to make sure the poorer nations had access to the eventual vaccinations. WHO had correctly predicted that the vaccines would be hogged by the richer countries. Covax had delivered its billionth vaccine dose in mid-January this year.
ACT-A (Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator) needs $23.4 billion for its programme for the period between October 2021 to September 2022, but the World Health Organisation has only been able to raise around $800 million so far. The scheme wants $16 billion upfront from the rich countries to close the financial gap so that the rest can be self-funded by the middle-income countries.
The chief of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the steady spread of the latest variant of Coronavirus, Omicron, has made it all the more important to ensure the tests, treatments, and vaccines are being distributed equitably all over the world. He said that no matter where we live, the Coronavirus is not finished just yet.
Tedros further added that Science has given tools to us for fighting against the COVID-19 and if these tools are shared globally in solidarity, the COVID-19 can be ended as a global health emergency this year. As per the data, only 0.4 per cent of the overall 4.7 billion Coronavirus tests that were administered all over the world were used by low-income countries. Only ten per cent of people in the low-income nations have been administered at least the first dose of vaccine.
The World Health Organisation said that the vast equity has been costing people’s lives and has been hurting economies across the world, it was also risking the emergence of fresh and more dangerous variants that are capable of robbing the current tools of their effectiveness completely. The vast equity can lead even the highly-vaccinated populations back by many months in case a new and more deadly variant emerges.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres has told the campaign launch that the global pandemic can be overcome this year, but they have to act now. He added that Vaccine inequity has been the biggest moral failure of our times and because of that countries are paying the price.
