The world is on the brink of a great scientific achievement.
A COVID-19 vaccine will likely be ready by early next year, in fact
we'll probably have more than one vaccine ready.
These vaccines will allow us to save millions of lives. They'll also have another enormous benefit,
they'll allow us to develop a plan for the world to globally eliminate COVID-19.
To achieve this goal of global elimination we need three things:
the capacity to produce billions of vaccines, the funding to pay for them,
and the systems to deliver them everywhere. The world's low and lower middle income countries
are home to nearly half of the global population, because they don't have the purchasing power
of the wealthy countries they risk not getting nearly enough doses unless we do better they'll
only be able to cover 14 percent of their people with a COVID-19 vaccine.
A vaccine can make COVID-19 a preventable disease and no one should die of a preventable disease
simply because the country they live in can't afford the vaccine, but you don't
even have to care about the equity view to see the problem with the rich country only scenario
today even wealthy countries with very low case numbers are still suffering.
Australia and New Zealand have done a great job and gone long stretches with very few cases inside
their borders but their economies remain distorted because their trading partners are on lockdown and
occasionally a carry of the virus comes into these countries creating new clusters of the disease.
The only way to eliminate the threat of this disease somewhere is to eliminate it everywhere
the solution is not shaming the rich countries that are
doing the natural thing of wanting to protect their people. The solution is
to vastly increase the manufacturing capacity so we can cover everyone as soon as possible.
It's been amazing to see these private companies agreeing to expand drug making capacity by using
each other's factories. We have a number of agreements like this but we need even more
especially for the vaccine. That's why I'm thrilled today to announce a new joint agreement
signed this morning by 16 pharmaceutical companies and the gates foundation. In this agreement the
companies commit to among other things scaling up manufacturing at an unprecedented speed and
making sure that approved vaccines reach broad distribution as early as possible.
The next component we need for global elimination is the funding to pay for those vaccines.
The pharmaceutical industry has already made significant commitments in this area as well.
The companies involved in the agreement are committed to using donations
for growing profits and using tiered pricing to make their products as affordable as possible.
So another element here is that we need public funding uh to pay for these vaccines for all
countries and this is where the act accelerator comes in, it's supported by Gobby and The Global
Fund. Both organizations have spent two decades becoming experts in how to buy and deliver
vaccines diagnostics and drugs to developing countries. The United Kingdom has donated enough
money for the accelerator to purchase hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for poor countries.
I want to thank Prime Minister, Johnson, and the foreign secretary
for this amazing leadership commitment and I want to encourage other countries to do the same.
Finally even when we have the manufacturing capacity and funding lined up we'll need to
strengthen health systems to achieve the broad coverage to deliver the vaccine
and monitor for outbreaks. In doing this we can take the lessons we've learned from the
ongoing effort to eradicate polio. With the right diagnostics health workers can also
sound the alarm if a future disease jumps from bats or birds or any animal to humans.
In other words we can also be building the system that will help reduce the damage
of the next pandemic I'm confident that the world will build a plan
to eliminate COVID-19 saving millions of lives and getting on a path to global recovery. Thank you.