COVAX FACILITY

COVAX FACILITY

Subject : Governance

Context :A day after Punjab Cabinet decided to join COVAX to procure covid vaccine at cheaper prices, the government said it was exploring options on how to tie up with the facility.

Concept :

• COVAX is one of three pillars of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, which was launched in April 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commission and France in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
• The ACT Accelerator is a framework for collaboration to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. It is built on three main pillars: Vaccines (COVAX), Therapeutics, Diagnostics.
• COVAX is an effort to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to Covid-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth.
• The initial aim is to have 2 billion doses available by the end of 2021, which should be enough to protect high risk and vulnerable people, as well as frontline healthcare workers.
• It is co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), working in partnership with developed and developing country vaccine manufacturers.
• The COVAX facility continually monitors the Covid-19 vaccine landscape to identify the most suitable vaccine candidates, based on scientific merit and scalability, and works with manufacturers to incentivise them to expand their production capacity in advance of vaccines receiving regulatory approval.
• Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a mechanism within the COVAX facility, is to ensure that the 92 middle- and lower-income countries that cannot fully afford to pay for Covid-19 vaccines themselves get equal access to Covid-19 vaccines as higher-income self-financing countries and at the same time.
• India is a Gavi beneficiary and will, therefore, receive a certain proportion of the vaccines from the COVAX facility