WHO, partners unveil ambitious plan to deliver 2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine to high-risk populations

[Mary Wilson]

By HELEN BRANSWELL @HelenBranswell

JUNE 26, 2020
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he World Health Organization and key partners unveiled a plan Friday to purchase 2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines for the highest risk populations of the world.

The plan anticipates that by the end of 2021, the doses could be delivered to countries to vaccinate high risk individuals, likely including health care workers, people over the age of 65, and other adults who suffer from conditions like diabetes.

The WHO and its partners — the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — estimate it will cost $18.1 billion to deliver on the plan. The effort is one pillar of the WHO’s effort to ensure all countries have access to Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics, called the ACT Accelerator, short for Access to Covid-19 Tools.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/26...of-covid-19-vaccine-to-high-risk-populations/

 

[JJackson]

Nice plan but what odds that Countries will allow more than token amounts out to treat high risk groups abroad while much of their own population are not yet vaccinated? Now is the time to get commitments from all countries, with vaccines in the pipeline, to agree to some form of shared distribution before we know which, if any, of the vaccines work. If you wait until one country has a working vaccine the politicians are going to have extreme difficulty in getting the arrangement past their own public, if it is arranged now they can sell it as it may be a Chinese, UK, US or other country that has the first working vaccine. The three strongest candidates, IMO, are the Moderna RNA vaccine (US) and the two inactivated whole viral vaccines from the UK and China all are at the stage 2/ stage 3 boundary. Scaling up is a whole other problem.