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NEW YORK: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday (September 30) that it is time for countries to start using money from their national COVID-19 response and recovery plans to help fund the World Health Organization Global Vaccine Plan.
The ACT-Accelerator program and its COVAX facility has received $ 3 billion so far, but needs another $ 35 billion. Its goal is to deliver two billion doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of next year, 245 million treatments and 500 million tests.
“The ACT-Accelerator provides the only safe and secure way to reopen the global economy as quickly as possible. A national vaccination effort in a handful of countries will not open the doors to the global economy and will restore livelihoods,” Guterres said at a high level. UN-level virtual event.
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab urged other countries to join the global effort, telling the UN meeting that ACT-Accelerator is the best hope of controlling the pandemic.
Guterres said the program needed an immediate injection of $ 15 billion to “avoid missing the window of opportunity” for anticipated purchase and production, to build inventory in parallel with licensing, boost research and help countries get prepared.
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“We cannot allow a delay in access to further widen the already huge inequalities,” Guterres said at the virtual event.
“But let’s be clear: we will not get there with donors simply by allocating resources only from the Official Development Assistance budget,” he said. “We need to think big. It’s time for countries to get funding from their own response and recovery programs.”
Guterres called on all countries to step up significantly in the next three months.
He noted that developed countries had spent billions of dollars on the socio-economic impacts of the crisis, so “surely, we can invest a small fraction of that to stop the spread of the disease everywhere.”
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