Covax had to renegotiate its contracts with four vaccine suppliers, to reduce them from 400 to 600 million doses. Four hundred million doses of Pfizer that were donated by the United States government have been converted into future options available in 2023.
“We haven’t massively overbought,” Dr Berkley said, adding that he expects demand from countries that continue to try to administer primary or booster doses will broadly match the doses that Gavi has. has.
“In the event of a pandemic, I would rather buy too many doses, than not have enough doses, especially since countries felt that there were not enough doses at the beginning,” he said. . “If you want to get doses early, you have to go ahead and place orders, even if you don’t know if they’re going to work, and that’s a risk. You have to take risks.”
The Gavi Secretariat is proposing to board members that the organization retain a $1.8 billion pool that will enable the acquisition of new doses as needed through 2025 and support for vaccine delivery.
Dr Berkley said the “pandemic preparedness pool” is meant to act as insurance against another situation where Gavi has to procure vaccines for developing countries (against a new variant of Covid, for example) and is forced to compete with the deep pockets of wealthier countries.
Some board members have expressed concern that the organization is sitting on these funds.
“We just want to make sure the money won’t be used until we have a lot more conversations about where these funds are going,” a board member said. “We don’t have any governance in place right now for how to manage this fund. The important thing is that we don’t want them to use these funds to expand their mandate.
Dr Orin Levine, an epidemiologist who until September 2021 represented the Gates Foundation on the Gavi board, said Covax’s fate was sealed in mid-2021. fundamental flaw for us as a global community,” he said. “We couldn’t get rich countries to slow down their individual vaccine ordering to help other people start their first ones.”
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