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The World Bank Board of Directors approved a $ 12 billion aid plan to ensure that developing countries have access to COVID-19 vaccines quickly when these vaccines become available.
The International Finance Corporation said in a statement that this amount will be used to “finance the purchase and distribution of vaccines, tests and treatments for Covid-19 for citizens of developing countries,” noting that these funds are supposed to be enough to vaccinate “up to one billion people.” The World Bank stated that it intends to send “a signal to the pharmaceutical and research industry that citizens of developing countries must also obtain safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines.”
This comes when Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals Group announced on Monday that it had suspended clinical trials of its experimental vaccine against Covid-19 after one of the participants in these trials fell ill with an unexplained illness. The World Bank statement added that it will provide technical support to help countries prepare for a large-scale vaccine distribution, in coordination with international partners.
The statement noted that this financing is part of a $ 160 billion aid package that the World Bank has allocated through June 2021 to help developing countries fight the Covid-19 pandemic. The statement quoted World Bank President David Malpass as saying that “access to safe and effective vaccines and improved delivery systems is essential to turn the tide of the pandemic and help countries facing disastrous economic and financial shocks move forward. towards a resilient recovery. ” The World Bank board has been awaiting board approval since Malpass unveiled the project in late September.
An effective and safe vaccine
At the time, he believed that an “effective and safe” vaccine was essential for the world to open again. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, he pointed out the need to get ahead of the Moors “because the vaccine distribution process is complex”, while the vaccines have not yet been commercialized. He recalled the “strong” experience of the World Bank in relation to vaccination programs against polio and measles or even in crisis management such as Ebola.
For her part, the director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, stressed, for her part, for weeks that the solution to this epidemic is to ensure that everything achieved (tests, treatment or vaccination) is carried out on a large scale in all countries, including the poorest. Many rich countries, including the United Kingdom, the European Union and Japan, have followed the approach of the United States, which has signed several contracts with laboratories to ensure that the first available doses are obtained, according to a report issued by the non-governmental organization Oxfam . The organization calculated that these countries, which represent 13 percent of the world’s population, had previously purchased half of future doses of Covid-19 vaccines.
As a precaution, these countries source from several competing manufacturers, in the hope that at least one of the vaccines will be effective. However, the report emphasizes the difficulty that a part of the world population will face in obtaining vaccines in the first stage. The World Health Organization had established a mechanism to facilitate access by poor countries to a vaccine against the emerging corona virus, called the Kovacs Global Vaccine Facility, which was joined by more than 60 rich countries except the United States. The Kovacs initiative aims to deliver vaccines to poorer countries as soon as they are developed, to respond to concerns about the possibility of richer countries restricting the distribution of real estate manufactured by their pharmaceutical companies.
