A special event by Italian G20 Presidency co-hosted by the European Commission
By Carl Bildt, Special Envoy of the ACT-Accelerator, Co-Chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and former Prime Minister of Sweden
A year ago, we were near the beginning of efforts to fight the pandemic. It was obvious then that it would require an unprecedented and truly global mobilization of scientific talent, financial resources, industrial agility, and political will to turn the pandemic around.
Since then there have been some remarkable feats of progress. We have rapid diagnostic tests that can be used anywhere, and virtually no one would have been able to predict that in under a year we would have several reliable and efficient vaccines – and that more than 900 million doses would have been administered. It’s been an extraordinary success in terms of scientific advances, industrial agility, and global mobilization. But this isn’t a time for celebration or complacency.
It would also have been unthinkable to imagine that a year later the number of people testing positive for COVID-19 would have increased eightfold and still be increasing in all six regions of the World Health Organization, with over three million people having lost their lives.
We, collectively – as governments, business, and the international community, are losing our fight, and we are failing in our duty to bring this pandemic under control.
The COVAX Facility has already distributed vaccines to more than a hundred countries around the world; however supply constraints and political choices continue to create difficulties, giving rise to the dangerous fact that so far only 0.3% of the total vaccines administrated globally have gone to low-income countries. Vaccine inequity risks not only endangering the global recovery, and giving an easier path to new variants, it also breeds global resentment that might be difficult to overcome.
Both in North America and Europe there will soon be a situation where vaccines are very widely available, at which point they should then have an even greater interest in making global coordinated efforts a priority.
Vaccines are undoubtedly important, but equally important are tests and treatments – including an urgent need for oxygen. Making them all more broadly available worldwide is imperative. Without testing we are in the dark as to nature of the new variants that will continue to appear, and without treatments we can’t help those that will get infected.
All of this will require resources. While much has been mobilized, it isn’t enough. The ACT-Accelerator – the global partnership to deliver the tests, treatments and vaccines the world needs to bring an end to the pandemic, is lacking 18.5 billion of funding for this year. That’s a lot of money, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of a percent of the trillions of recovery spending now underway to treat the economic fallout of COVID-19. Spending a penny now will save a pound in the long run.
Kristalina Georgieva of the IMF has underlined that “this year and next year vaccine policy is economic policy” and it is “more important than traditional tools of fiscal and monetary policy”. Spending trillions on recovery support, while neglecting the billions necessary for vaccines, treatments, and therapeutics, will dampen and delay the recovery of the global economy, and cost even more lives.
The financing must be mobilized, the mechanisms are in place, and the urgency should be clear to everyone.
As we enter the second year of fighting the pandemic, we are entering a dangerous phase. Some countries are discussing opening up, but globally we are faced with inequitable access to tools that risks prolonging and deepening the pandemic everywhere.
As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the WHO has made clear, “no one is safe until everyone is safe”. We should all have learnt by now that the virus knows no borders. A new variant from anywhere could unravel progress everywhere – even in a country that has achieved 100% vaccination.
Only a reinforced global effort can turn it around within the timeframe we all wish. With the Global Health Summit taking place tomorrow and the G7 Summit next month, world leaders face a choice. Invest in saving lives by dealing with the cause of the pandemic everywhere, now, or continue to spend trillions on the consequences with no end in sight. The time to ACT is now.