Day: April 11, 2022

EIB President Werner Hoyer joined leaders from the G7, G20 and the African Union in Berlin today for the Break COVID Now summit, hosted by the German Chancellor.

Support from EIB for global pandemic response

COVAX has received €900 million from the European Investment Bank as part of Team Europe.

President Hoyer pledged an additional €1 billion, subject to EIB shareholder approval, to help Gavi COVID-19 Vaccines Advance Market Commitment (COVAX AMC) respond quickly to unexpected COVID-19 pandemic risks.

This funding will allow Gavi to frontload additional capital, support the pandemic vaccine pool, improve vaccine supply and delivery logistics and also help acquire doses from local manufacturers, particularly in Africa.

Multilateral cooperation to strengthen global health

The Break COVID Now summit aims to improve global health security by increasing availability to vaccines and enabling an expedient response to future pandemics.

Individuals, communities, and economies will continue to be harmed by the COVID-19 epidemic as long as coverage gaps exist.

The Gavi COVAX AMC summit seeks to raise $1.1 billion for urgent delivery support and launch a $2.7 billion Pandemic Vaccine.

Covax has succeeded

To achieve the world’s largest and fastest global vaccine rollout, COVAX has established a worldwide procurement, shipment, and delivery system centred on vaccination equity: getting COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries. COVAX has provided approximately 1.2 billion vaccination doses to AMC-supported countries.

The Gavi COVAX AMC has now vaccinated 42 percent of the population of low-income countries with two doses, compared to 58 percent globally. In January 2022, 34 countries had less than 10% coverage; currently, that figure is 19.

For the first time in two years, ensuring more vaccine supplies is no longer the world’s top priority. COVAX can deliver the doses AMC-supported countries need, when they need them. These achievements have been enabled by contributions to the AMC, including by the EIB, which have funded Gavi’s advance purchase agreements on behalf of COVAX, as well as dose donations.

However there is more to do.

COVAX continues to adapt to ensure lower-income countries have the support they need: now, and in the future. COVAX provides AMC eligible economies with flexible and adaptable support that can help them reach their vaccination targets and expand these targets

Leveraging new and existing financial instruments

Gavi has worked with partners like the EIB to expand the existing array of innovative financial products.

New partnerships are announced ahead of the Gavi COVAX AMC summit, giving donors more options to make multi-year pledges, frontload cash, and for the first time, structure some of those commitments as contingent pledges; and making it easier for AMC eligible countries and their MDB financing partners to purchase additional doses through COVAX.

Source: European Investment Bank

The World Health Organization said on Monday it is tracking a few dozen cases of two new sub-variants of the highly transmissible omicron strain of the coronavirus to assess whether they are more infectious or dangerous.

It has added BA.4 and BA.5, sister variants of the original BA.1 omicron variant, to its list for monitoring. It is already tracking BA.1 and BA.2 — now globally dominant — as well as BA.1.1 and BA.3.

The WHO said it had begun tracking them because of their “additional mutations that need to be further studied to understand their impact on immune escape potential.”

Viruses mutate all the time but only some mutations affect their ability to spread or evade prior immunity from vaccination or infection, or the severity of disease they cause.

For instance, BA.2 now represents nearly 94% of all sequenced cases and is more transmissible than its siblings, but the evidence so far suggests it is no more likely to cause severe disease.

Only a few dozen cases of BA.4 and BA.5 have been reported to the global GISAID database, according to WHO.

The UK’s Health Security Agency said last week BA.4 had been found in South Africa, Denmark, Botswana, Scotland and England from Jan. 10 to March 30.

All the BA.5 cases were in South Africa as of last week, but on Monday Botswana’s health ministry said it had identified four cases of BA.4 and BA.5, all among people aged 30 to 50 who were fully vaccinated and experiencing mild symptoms.

Source: Voice of America