By Zha Daojiong
To deal with the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, over 170 economies formed a multilateral arrangement, known as the Covax Facility, in June to secure vaccines in a cost-effective, targeted way.
Proposed by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization (WHO), the facility will seek investment to secure approved vaccines for the most at-risk groups in all participating economies. The Covax Facility is probably the biggest multilateral cooperation initiative since the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015.
China joined the Covax Facility on October 8, a follow-up on its commitment that any vaccine developed domestically will be made available as an international public good, especially for developing countries. It is also working with a dozen other economies to develop a COVID-19 vaccine via clinical tests and joint manufacturing and distribution. By October, four out of the nine candidate vaccines in the third and final stages of clinical trial were from China.
A long project: Scientists from around the world started developing vaccines or therapies as soon as Chinese scientists released the sequence of the COVID-19 genome on the Internet in January. Vaccine development is normally a lengthy process. It can take as long as a decade to ensure a new vaccine is safe and effective before it is approved for public use. So far, close to 100 vaccines are in different stages of development. Once the national regulatory approval is given, WHO will activate its evaluation mechanism for the vaccine’s international distribution.
The Covax Facility will pool investment from the participants so that the developers of successful vaccines can begin mass production as soon as possible. The products will then be distributed in a fair and equitable manner among the members.
The higher-income participants will finance the vaccines from their own public finance budgets. They will partner with lower-income members supported by an advance market commitment (AMC) to secure $2 billion by the end of 2020. Contributions to the AMC are expected to come from sovereign donors, philanthropic organizations and the private sector. If the AMC meets its fundraising target, the 92 lower-middle- and low-income participating economies in the facility will benefit.
As China is in the upper tier of middle-income economies on a per-capita basis, it is going to be a self-financing participant. It has reportedly offered to purchase doses to cover the needs of 1 percent of its 1.4-billion population.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
