Countries in the Americas are pooling their efforts to ensure access to treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, The Director of the Pan American Health Organization, Carissa F. Etienne, said.
Acting as a bloc, PAHO member states will benefit from our technical expertise, as well as our decades of experience securing and distributing vaccines quickly and efficiently. We will also ensure the process is as inclusive as possible by allocating doses fairly among those countries participating.”
Dr. Etienne said that the PAHO Revolving Fund for vaccines can be used as a strategic asset to buy and distribute vaccines for COVID-19 when they become available. Some 20 of the 150 current vaccine candidates are already being tested on volunteers.
PAHO is also involved in the WHO COVAX facility, a group effort to negotiate with vaccine producers, and it is supporting Latin American and Caribbean countries to join a collaboration to accelerate the development, production and distribution of future COVID-19 vaccines. Under WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, the COVAX Facility will negotiate on behalf of many countries worldwide with the producers of all promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
“We already have 30 countries and territories joining the facility through PAHO’s Revolving Fund, and we are excited to see more expressions of interest from our Member States in the coming days. The more countries that join, the stronger we will be.”
PAHO is also coordinating with GAVI and other partners to guarantee that the most vulnerable countries in the region receive the vaccine against COVID 19 subsidized and at an affordable price.
The PAHO Revolving Fund, a shared mechanism for purchasing and delivering vaccines, has worked for 35 years to pool resources for 41 countries, which can buy high-quality, life-saving vaccines for their national immunization programs at lower prices, and has been vital in eliminating polio, measles, mumps, and rubella from the Americas.
Original source: PAHO
Published on 14 July 2020
