Governing the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator: towards greater participation, transparency, and accountability.
Lancet
; 399(10323): 487-494, 2022 01 29.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1671323
ABSTRACT
The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) is a multistakeholder initiative quickly constructed in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to respond to a catastrophic breakdown in global cooperation. ACT-A is now the largest international effort to achieve equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies, and its governance is a matter of broad public importance. We traced the evolution of ACT-A's governance through publicly available documents and analysed it against three principles embedded in the founding mission statement of ACT-A participation, transparency, and accountability. We found three challenges to realising these principles. First, the roles of the various organisations in ACT-A decision making are unclear, obscuring who might be accountable to whom and for what. Second, the absence of a clearly defined decision making body; ACT-A instead has multiple centres of legally binding decision making and uneven arrangements for information transparency, inhibiting meaningful participation. Third, the nearly indiscernible role of governments in ACT-A, raising key questions about political legitimacy and channels for public accountability. With global public health and billions in public funding at stake, short-term improvements to governance arrangements can and should now be made. Efforts to strengthen pandemic preparedness for the future require attention to ethical, legitimate arrangements for governance.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Global Health
/
Clinical Governance
/
Pandemics
/
COVID-19
/
International Cooperation
Type of study:
Diagnostic study
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Lancet
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
S0140-6736(21)02344-8
Similar
MEDLINE
...
LILACS
LIS