Investing in strong health systems and primary care now is essential to fight COVID-19, mitigate its negative impact on the delivery of essential health services and prevent future pandemics.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board congratulates Gavi and the government of the United Kingdom for an extremely successful replenishment. Not only will the funds collected continue to provide immunization to millions worldwide and contribute to strengthening health systems, they will be crucial to support the deployment of vaccines against COVID-19 once they are developed. Investing in routine immunization prevents deadly outbreaks of preventable diseases and removes avoidable complexity from the pandemic response. Leaders must invest carefully to ensure that progress made over decades to fight other diseases such as polio, measles and cholera can continue. A fully funded Gavi is an important step in that direction.
It is estimated that billions of doses will be needed to fully vaccinate people globally against COVID-19. Production and deployment at this scale has never been done before. Unless significant investment and planning is done now to increase global manufacturing and supply capacities, the GPMB is concerned that the deployment of a vaccine against COVID-19 to everyone who needs it could take several years.
Until global production capacities are sufficient to reach everyone, the world needs a strategy to ensure that vaccines will be allocated in a way that will have the most impact in stopping the pandemic and will ensure fair and equitable access, with priority to those that need it the most, including healthcare workers, first responders, caregivers and other essential workers. Otherwise, the limited supply of vaccines risks being pre-allocated based on ability to pay—not health impact—threatening to prolong the pandemic and increasing preventable deaths globally.
The GPMB is deeply concerned at reports of vaccine nationalism and bilateral deals to secure first access to potential COVID-19 vaccines. This pandemic puts everyone at risk; global solidarity is the best public health strategy. Governments must urgently come together and support global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, including by the poorest countries and poorest communities. The GPMB calls for all countries and international financial institutions to contribute funding to the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator to also ensure that diagnostics and therapeutics are developed and distributed in an effective and equitable manner.
The launch of the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility represents an important step in ensuring that we have equitable access to affordable vaccines against COVID-19 in sufficient quantities to vaccinate everyone. The GPMB encourages all governments, regional groups that invest in regional vaccine supplies as well as international financial institutions to join this GAVI-led effort.
While a vaccine may be one of our best tools in the fight against COVID-19, to protect people, we need to get all the way to immunization. Strong health systems, country preparedness, and appropriate, affordable and available products are all critical elements, as are community engagement, accountability and trust. These are also fundamental to support routine immunization. Without this, even the development of a highly effective vaccine will not stop the spread of COVID-19.
About the GPMB
As an independent monitoring and advocacy body, the GPMB urges political action to prepare for and mitigate the effects of global health emergencies. Co-convened by the World Bank Group and the WHO, the GPMB works independently to provide expert assessments and recommendations on the state of global preparedness. The opinions and recommendations of the GPMB are those of the Board and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank Group and WHO. The GPMB ‘A World At Risk’ annual report is available here. For further details contact gpmbsecretariat@who.int