WHO funding model ‘left world ill-prepared’ for COVID

Speed read Global health leaders, non-profits call on WHO leadership to review funding Member States urged to pay higher contributions to safeguard global health Consensus must be reached before World Health Assembly in May - UN health strategist A key meeting of the WHO’s executive board has spawned an upswell of calls to overhaul the UN agency’s funding, with leaders saying failure to invest in global health left the world ill-prepared for the COVID-19 “tsunami of suffering”. A letter signed by a host of leaders including Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, co-chairs of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, and Gordon Brown, WHO Ambassador for Global Health Financing, decried the world’s “ailing approach to investing in global public health, and universal health coverage”, laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Congratulations @DrTedros nominated for a second term as DG. @WHO is the only global normative & technical health agency and it needs sustainable financing to deliver on its huge mandate. https://t.co/IbTBE8gyOG — Soumya Swaminathan (@doctorsoumya) January 25, 2022 Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, in the US, told SciDev.Net that the WHO’s budget was “wholly incommensurate with its global responsibilities”.

Q&A: Women locked in care cycle as COVID-19 diverts funds

While this data has not been disaggregated by gender, pregnant women are three times more likely to suffer from severe disease as a result of malarial infection compared with their nonpregnant counterparts and have a mortality rate from severe disease of almost 50 per cent. NTD programmes must engage with other health programmes related to maternal and child health services that can provide information to girls and women about disease prevention and treatment. [...]female doctoral students made up the majority in the lab where I did my PhD at McGill University.

Rich countries ‘must give 1bn vaccines’ to poor – COVID-19 panel

Speed read COVID-19 pandemic could have been prevented, independent panel finds Delays in response, denial of science resulted in global crisis Rich nations must step up with vaccine doses for poorer countries Richer countries must provide low- and middle-income countries with at least one billion vaccine doses by September, an independent panel on COVID-19 has urged in a damning report that says the deadly pandemic could have been avoided. The panel said vaccine production needed to be scaled up “urgently and equitably” across the globe, with manufacturing capacity built up in Africa, Latin America and other low- and middle-income regions, as current production capacity was stretched to the limit. Peter Piot, head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, welcomed calls for a Global Health Threats Council and urged immediate action on vaccine redistribution.

Handwashing ‘impossible’ for one in three amid COVID-19

The joint World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF report also found that nearly half the world’s population in 2020 lacked safely managed sanitation and one in four lacked safe drinking water. Maria Neira, director, WHO department of environment, climate change and health Sub-Saharan Africa was found to have the slowest rate of progress in the world, with only 54 per cent of people using safe drinking water. Rachael McDonnell, deputy director general for the International Water Management Institute, says data collection is crucial to furthering progress.

Global research partnerships ‘obliterated’ by UK aid cuts

Speed read More than 800 research projects will be affected by deep cuts to UK aid budget Thousands of scientists call on British government to revoke the plans Leading researchers say cuts undermine trusted partnerships Dramatic cuts to UK foreign aid budgets have left the future of hundreds of research projects in developing countries hanging in the balance and trusted partnerships severely undermined, say leading scientists. “The real concern has to be for our partners, who trusted in this process and the early career researchers who will lose their jobs, and the wasted progress on important development issues,” Jenni Barclay, professor of volcanology, University of East Anglia Nick Talbot, executive director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said it was a “massive breach of trust” to cut ongoing projects of real impact for developing countries. Talbot, a world-renowned expert in molecular plant pathology, leads a project on rice blast, a disease that can devastate rice yields, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where disease-resistant varieties are lacking and control strategies limited.

COVID-19 hunger spike leaves 1 in 5 Africans malnourished

According to the report, more than 2.3 billion people — 30 per cent of the global population — lacked year-round access to adequate food. See PDF] Nothing short of a “radical transformation” of the agri-food system would lead to achieving the UN goal of ending hunger by 2030, they said in a statement released with the report. The report comes ahead of three major UN summits later this year which leaders hoped will give the issue of food security some momentum — the UN Food Systems Summit, Nutrition for Growth Summit and COP26 climate change talks.

‘Catastrophic moral failure’ risk over COVID-19 shots – WHO

Speed read One of the poorest countries has administered only 25 doses of the vaccine Equitable vaccine rollout critical amid new virus variants Vaccine makers are ‘prioritising profits’ over fair access As few as 25 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in one of the world’s poorest countries, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said, warning of a “catastrophic moral failure”. Since January 1, the world has been recording an average of almost 12,500 daily deaths and 682,000 recorded cases, according to a report published Tuesday by the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. According to ourworldindata.org, an initiative by the University of Oxford and partners which is collating data on the pandemic, the United Arab Emirates is currently delivering the highest number of vaccines per 100 people at 1.16 doses.

Boosters condemned as COVAX reins in supply forecast

See PDF] A day earlier, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “appalled” by comments from an association of pharmaceutical manufacturers that G7 countries have enough vaccine supplies to fully cover all adults and teenagers, and offer booster shots to at-risk groups. [...]doses may be necessary for the most at-risk populations […] Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stressed the benefits of a third dose, in an online lecture, and said: ”We can do both: we can do a booster programme at the same time as dramatically increase the doses going to low- and middle- income countries, which is the reason why we [the US] have already given over 100 million doses to 90 countries and will be giving a half a billion doses by the time we get into 2022.”