Life Science Companies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation commit to expanded global access for COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines

COVID-19’s existence anywhere poses a threat to communities everywhere. The health, social, and economic impacts can only be addressed through the collective actions of stakeholders across private, public, and philanthropic sectors in partnership with civil society.

Earlier this year AstraZeneca; Bayer; bioMérieux; Boehringer Ingelheim; Bristol Myers Squibb; Eisai; Eli Lilly; Gilead; GSK; Johnson & Johnson; Merck & Co. (known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada); Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany; Novartis; Pfizer; Roche; and Sanofi together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation each pledged to the fight against COVID-19.

Collectively, they have launched the most expansive and ambitious pandemic R&D response effort in history, with the promise of a range of interventions that can help end the pandemic. Creating these innovations is not enough, however. Through partnerships with other stakeholders, they are committed to ensuring global access to diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines that will help to accelerate the end of the pandemic. To accomplish this critical goal, they will:

• Develop innovations for patients worldwide.
• Strive for timely availability.
• Enable affordability for lower-income countries.
• Support effective and equitable distribution of these innovations globally.
• Maintain public confidence in our innovations.

Access to interventions to fight COVID-19 on a global scale requires financial resources, assets, infrastructure, and jurisdictional support and collaboration beyond the capacity or role of the signatories to this commitment. The organizations are therefore calling on governments, multilateral institutions, companies, NGOs, and others to build on these commitments and efforts already underway to:

• Provide sufficient, dedicated, sustainable, and timely funding for the procurement and delivery of the tools necessary to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Diversify representation in critical decision-making and coordination bodies with special emphasis on voices representing low-income and lower-middle-income countries.
• Continue quickly developing and communicating clear guidance on product needs in lower-resource settings as early as possible.
• Advance fit-for-purpose regulatory and liability processes for all stakeholders involved, which prioritize safety while not slowing down access to critical new tools.
• Build and maintain public confidence in the approval mechanisms for diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines by ensuring robust safety and efficacy reviews and removing unwarranted political considerations from these discussions and the approval process.
• Enhance country readiness and in-country delivery systems by ensuring adequate expertise and resources are in place for effective country planning, distribution, and follow-up for new diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines.

The world’s extraordinary situation requires unprecedented collaboration across every part of society. To date, these science and philanthropic organizations have risen to this challenge and recognize the need to push further. The commitments above will save lives only if partners across the entire development-to-deployment pathway work together to guarantee products reach the people who need them. The ACT-Accelerator offers a forum for collaboration and action, and the global community must collectively mobilize the resources partners have identified as critical to ending this pandemic for communities everywhere.

Original source: Gates Foundation