Ending the pandemic requires collaboration, funding and creative thinking – there is much yet to do
Kate Bingham, chair of the UK's Vaccine Taskforce, joins Bill Gates at the Grand Challenges annual meeting to explore the health and development impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. She reflects on the significance of the COVAX programme established to provide equitable access to a Covid-19 vaccine for everyone who needs it
In his presidential inauguration speech in January 1961, John F Kennedy famously said: “United, there is little we cannot do... Divided, there is little we can do.” Those words have rarely rung truer than now, as the world battles the Covid-19 pandemic.
With the search for a safe and effective vaccine well underway, it is vital that countries pool their resources to ensure fair global access to this vaccine or vaccines when they’re found. No country can stand alone in this, and no country should be isolated. As we all know, Covid-19 doesn’t respect borders. No one is safe until we’re all safe. Unless countries all over the world have a mutual interest in working together, there is little we can do.
Which is why Boris Johnson’s £548 million pledge to help fund an internationally coordinated response is a giant leap in the right direction. The money will go to COVAX, a multilateral initiative that will accelerate vaccine development, scale-up manufacturing and provide vaccines, with an ambitious target of reaching 1 billion people globally by the end of next year. The organisation will act as a sort of invisible scaffolding rig around the world: it’ll provide a framework that will help eradicate this pandemic and ensure we’re much quicker to respond to the next one.
In the past, the world got it wrong when it came to pandemics. We were too slow in ensuring that the solutions – like the diseases themselves – reached across borders. A lag of 10-15 years was not uncommon after a medicine first became available for it to be rolled out more widely. For example, during the H1N1 – or Swine flu – pandemic of 2009, we were all too slow to collaborate.
This response – a natural response perhaps to succumb to the temptation to focus on the problems that are nearer to home and easier to solve – was unscientific and uneconomical. The faster we can provide global access to a vaccine, the more lives are saved and the sooner the pandemic ends for everyone. For every month that the pandemic is reduced, the world saves roughly $500 billion, according to the IMF.
And this time, we’re tackling those hard problems and working across borders to launch an unprecedented collaboration to make and share vaccines on a truly global scale. COVAX’s goal is to ensure every country is able to vaccinate its most vulnerable people.
From the first pledging events in April to the UK-hosted Global Vaccine Summit in June to the Prime Minister’s speech at the UN General Assembly last month, the UK has been working closely with other countries and NGOs to build the financial and political support necessary to turn this idealistic vision into a practical reality. By enabling us to work with partners overseas, our participation in COVAX will help us to secure a vaccine for UK citizens.
A vaccine is close, believe me: over 40 of the world’s 240 vaccine candidates are in clinical trials. Some are in advanced phase three trials. But simply discovering a vaccine is not enough. The job is not yet done – we will need to continue to work together to solve the shared challenges to a global immunisation campaign. We will need creative thinking at the largest and the smallest scales.
I hope you can see why all this requires effort, funding and creative thinking. The groundwork is already being laid but there is much still to do. The UK is proud of its part in this ground-breaking collaborative effort, bringing over 170 countries united in purpose, strategy and resolve together.
It is almost 60 years since Kennedy uttered those words at his inauguration in Washington. I hope that by the time the actual anniversary comes around, we will have gone a long way towards proving that, united, there is little we cannot do.
Kate Bingham is chair of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce. Listen to the Vaccinating the world. Covid-19: The Search for a Vaccine at Apple podcast for more on what is being done to ensure that countries are not left behind if a successful vaccine is developed and manufacture, supply, storage and distribution support for all countries.
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