COVAX is a global initiative aimed at working with vaccine manufacturers to provide countries worldwide equitable access to safe and effective vaccines, once they are licensed and approved.
The COVAX Facility is co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO announced last week that 172 countries are engaged in discussions to potentially participate in the initiative. On Monday, the European Commission confirmed it would contribute 400 million euros ($478 million) to the initiative, while it was announced that Germany had also joined but was still negotiating the amount of its contribution.
However, White House spokesperson, Judd Deere issued a terse statement saying, “The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.”
“This President will spare no expense to ensure that any new vaccine maintains our own FDA’s gold standard for safety and efficacy, is thoroughly tested, and saves lives,” Deere added, reports CNN.
Forbes is reporting that according to the Washington Post, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had “interest in exploring some type of role in Covax… but there was resistance in some corners of the government and a belief that the U.S. has enough coronavirus vaccine candidates in advanced clinical trials that it can go it alone.”
The Trump administration’s determination to “go it alone” flies in the face of WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s claim that “for the world to recover faster, it has to recover together, because it’s a globalized world: the economies are intertwined.”
“Equal access to a COVID-19 vaccine is the key to beating the virus and paving the way for recovery from the pandemic,” said Stefan Löfven, the prime minister of Sweden.
Needless to say, but the administration’s decision marks a notable bet on Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s effort to speed development of drugs, vaccines and other measures to fight the pandemic.
