LONDON, April 8 (BNA): In the latest Senate package aimed at stopping the coronavirus, US lawmakers have dropped nearly all funding to curb the virus outside US borders, a move many health experts have described as dangerously short-sighted, the Associated Press reports. . AP) reported.
They warn that suspending COVID-19 aid to poor countries may eventually allow for the kind of unchecked transmission needed to unfold the next troubling variable, revealing much of the progress that has been made so far.
The United States has been the largest contributor to the global pandemic response, providing more than 500 million vaccines, and the lack of funding would be a major setback. The money has paid for several interventions, including a mass vaccination campaign in the Cameroonian capital that saw hundreds of thousands of people get their first dose, as well as the construction of a COVID-19 care facility in South Africa and the donation of 1,000 respirators. for that country.
Other vaccination campaigns funded by the United States could also be halted in dozens of countries, including Uganda, Zambia, Ivory Coast and Mali.
“Any cut-off of funds will affect us,” said Misaki Winegra, a Ugandan official who heads a technical committee that advises the government on the response to the pandemic. He said Uganda relies heavily on donor help – it has received more than 11 million vaccines from the US – and that any cuts would “make it difficult for us to make ends meet”.
“This is little shocking to poor countries that promised billions in vaccines and resources last year in big pledges made by the G7 and G20,” said Michael Head, a global health research fellow at Britain’s University of Southampton.
“Given how far we have failed to equalize vaccines, it is clear that all of those promises are now broken,” he said, adding that without concerted efforts and funds to fight COVID-19 in the coming months, the pandemic could drag on for years. .
While about 66% of the US population has been fully immunized against the coronavirus, less than 15% of people in poor countries have received a single dose. Health officials working to vaccinate COVID-19 in developing countries with US backing say they expect progress to reverse once the money is gone.
“Vaccination will stop or even not start in some countries,” said Rachel Hall, executive director of US government advocacy at the charity CARE. She cited estimates from the US Agency for International Development that the suspended funding would mean canceling testing, treatment and health services for about 100 million people.
Despite a plethora of vaccines this year, many poor countries have struggled to get vaccines into the arms, and hundreds of millions of donated vaccines either expired, were returned or remained unused. To counter these logistical hurdles, US aid has funded important services in countries across Africa, including the safe delivery of vaccines, training of health workers, and the fight against vaccine misinformation.
For example, in November, the US Embassy in the Cameroonian capital set up a tent for mass vaccination: within the first five days, more than 300,000 people received a dose. It would now be difficult to conduct these kinds of events without US funding.
Hall also noted that there will be consequences beyond COVID-19, saying that countries struggling with multiple disease outbreaks, such as Congo and Mali, will face difficult choices.
“They will have to choose between fighting Ebola, malaria, polio, COVID and more,” she said.
Jeff Zentes, the outgoing chair of the White House COVID-19 task force, lamented that the legislation did not include resources to combat the international pandemic, noting that it would also harm efforts to track the genetic evolution of the virus.
“It is a real disappointment that there is no global funding in this bill,” he said. “This virus knows no borders, and it is in our national interest to vaccinate the world and protect against potential new variants.”
However, Zentes announced that the United States would be the first to donate “tens of millions” of doses for children to poor countries, and said that more than 20 countries had already requested the injections.
J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Center for Global Health Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, lamented that lawmakers were wrong on the side of optimism about the pandemic exactly when another surge arrived.
We’ve made this mistake many times in this pandemic. And we might make that mistake again. In recent weeks, cases of the highly contagious omicron subvariant BA.2 coronavirus COVID-19 have spread across Europe, and US officials say they expect a sharp rise in the US soon.
Other experts worried that suspending global US support for COVID-19 could lead officials to abandon current vaccination targets. The World Health Organization had set a goal of vaccinating at least 70% of people in all countries by the middle of this year, but with nearly 50 countries vaccinating less than 20% of their population, achieving that goal is highly unlikely.
Instead, some organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation have pushed officials to “refocus vaccination goals away from vaccinating 70% of all adults by summer to vaccinate the 90% of those most at risk in every country,” in what some critics say implied recognition of the world’s failure. Frequent sharing of vaccinations fairly. Others point out that there should be no competing vaccine targets and that health authorities simply need to do more, rather than adjust global targets.
In Nigeria, which has so far received at least $143 million in COVID-19 aid from the United States, authorities have rejected suggestions that its coronavirus programs will suffer as a result of a loss of funding. The Nigerian president’s office said assistance from the United States was mostly “in kind” through capacity building, research support, and donations of lab equipment and vaccines. “We are confident that this will not cause any disruption to our existing programs,” she said.
However, others have warned that the US decision sets an unfortunate precedent for global cooperation to end the pandemic at a time when new concerns such as the Ukraine war are attracting more attention.
US President Joe Biden originally planned to hold a virtual summit in the first quarter of this year to keep international efforts on track, but no event has been set.
“In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, we don’t have a deadline for the summit, but we are working closely with countries and international partners to advance commitments,” said a senior Biden administration official who was not authorized to comment. publicly.
As of this month, the World Health Organization said it had secured just $1.8 billion of the $16.8 billion needed from donors to speed up access to coronavirus vaccines, drugs and diagnostics.
“No one else is stepping up to fill the void right now, and the US decision to suspend funding may prompt other donor countries to act similarly,” said Dr. Krishna Udiakumar, director of Duke University’s Center for Global Health Innovation.
Keri Altoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, called the US funding suspension “devastating.”
“How can this be what we are discussing now?” She asked. “It is a moral obligation to the rest of the world to continue to contribute to this global response to the pandemic, not just to protect ourselves but to protect people around the world.
AOQ