The GAVI alliance said on Friday that the funds for a so-called advance market commitment (AMC) will allow it to buy an initial one billion vaccine doses for 92 eligible countries including India which would not otherwise be able to afford them.
The European Commission, France, Spain, South Korea, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others had in recent weeks pledged another USD 360 million to the AMC, the alliance said, bringing total funding over the USD2 billion target for this year.
However, another USD 5 billion is needed in 2021, to procure Covid-19 vaccine doses as they come through development and are approved by regulators, it said in a statement here on Friday.
“We’ve seen sovereign and private donors from across the world dig deep and meet this target and help ensure that every country will get access to COVID vaccines, not just the wealthy few,” GAVI chief Seth Berkley told reporters, adding that there was an “urgent need” to also finance treatments and diagnostics.
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, who this week said their experimental COVID-19 vaccine was 90% effective in initial trials, had expressed an interest in supplying doses to the COVAX facility, Berkley said.
“We continue to advance negotiations with a number of manufacturers in addition to those we’ve already announced who share our vision of fair and equitable distribution of vaccines,” he added.
Berkley said USD 5.3 billion was also still needed for diagnostics and USD 6.1 billion for therapeutics by the end of 2021.