JAKARTA - The World Health Organization (WHO) announced it needs USD 23.4 billion or around IDR 332.385.300 million over the next 12 months for the handling of COVID-19, urging the G20 to show leadership and pay.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus bluntly told the Group of 20 (G20) global powers, which meet this weekend in Rome, they can no longer allow poor countries to 'hang out' in the midst of a pandemic.
Tedros said the money was needed to secure vaccines, tests, and treatments for COVID-19, potentially preventing another five million deaths in the crisis.
He said the G20 "has the ability to make the necessary political and financial commitments to end this pandemic.
"We are at a decisive moment, needing decisive leadership to make the world safer," Tedros said.
The WHO-led Access to COVID Tools Accelerator aims to develop, manufacture, purchase, and distribute tools to tackle the pandemic.
The 23.4 billion dollars needed to fund it "pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars in economic losses caused by the pandemic and the cost of stimulus plans to support the national recovery ", the WHO said.
"Fully funding the ACT-Accelerator is a global health security imperative for all of us, the time to act is now," said Tedros.
But calls for arming risk meeting the same fate as previous attempts to shame rich nations about the growing gap between their own levels of protection against the virus and the world's poorest.
The WHO says only 0.4 percent of tests and 0.5 percent of vaccine doses used so far have been used in low-income countries, which make up nine percent of the world's population.
For this reason, the plan is to see ACT-A shift towards a more focused focus on addressing supply gaps in poor countries.
"No inequality is more pronounced than on the African continent, where only eight percent of the population has received a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine," said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
To note, only five of the 54 African countries are projected to meet WHO's year-end target of vaccinating 40 percent of their population.
ACT-A gave birth to the Covax facility, which is designed to ensure poor countries can access the vaccine eventually, predicting correctly that rich countries will monopolize all doses that go off the production line.
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So far, Covax has delivered 425 million doses to 144 regions, well below its target. WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said more than a billion donation doses had been pledged for the scheme, but only about 15 percent had actually materialized.
He also said 62 countries had started providing boosters and more countries were considering the move.
Swaminathan further explained, nearly one million booster doses are injected per day, three times the number of vaccines given in low-income countries.
Meanwhile, WHO wants a booster moratorium until the end of the year to free up jabs for poor countries.
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