What Is COVAX? Can It Stonewall Bilateral Relations?

By Rusiripala Tennakoon –MAY 25, 2021

Rusiripala Tennakoon

Some matters remain in exclusive realms to be confabulated only among the elite. But there is a saying that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. When the whole country was watching the king parading naked imagining he was wearing the best attire claimed by the weavers (according to the folk lore) that the clothe can be seen only by the wise. All choose to keep mum and tight lipped and a child shouted, ‘the king is naked’. The story goes on to explain what happened thereafter.

I read that Australia has about 600,000 Astra Zeneca vaccines which they are in a position to donate to a deserving country among many other Covid related paraphernalia. When I made enquiries from a few

of those I knew the answer I got was that it may not be possible for Australia to consider a request from us in this regard due to the operation of an International Organization called COVAX.

Like the talkative boy who decided to shout I thought of seeing whether the COVAX is stonewalling the choice of any country of helping another country on a bi-lateral basis.

Let me quote certain relevant extracts about this Organization to understand its origin and objectives better. In the year 2000 an Organization called Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) was formed based in Switzerland Geneva. It was expected to create equal opportunities to access vaccines to children in all parts of the world. It was a Global health partnership built as a Public private partnership with an innovative approach to International health and development by sharing the know-how, experience  and consensus on the strategies of all parties concerned.

The main activities of this Organization are as follows, “GAVI’s strategy supports its mission to save children’s lives and protect people’s health by increasing access to immunization in poor countries. It contributes to achieving the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals by focusing on performance, outcomes and results. Its partners provide funding for vaccines and intellectual resources for care advancement. They contribute, also, to strengthening the capacity of the health system to deliver immunization and other health services in a sustainable manner.”

IN the aftermath of the more recent Covid-19 pandemic the attention of global leaders had to be focused as a priority to a growing global crisis associated with the epidemic. Many related important issues had to be addressed to ensure the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines by accelerating the efforts for the development of diagnostics, treatments while guaranteeing fair and equitable access to the vaccines to people in all countries. Much emphasis was laid on the need to ensure that every one in the world has access to those vaccines. This gave birth to COVAX as a solution to all these issues, as unique organization with global collaboration with the objective of bringing the epidemic to an end.

COVAX has been described as, “a global organization with 3 pillars of the ACCESS to COVID-19 tools (ACT) accelerator which was launched in April  2020, by WHO, EU and France in response to the Pandemic outburst, bringing together governments ,global health Organizations, mnufacturers, scientists, private sector, civil society and philanthropy, with the aim of providing innovative and equitable access to COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments and vaccines .The COVAX pillar is focused on the latter.It is the only truly global solution to this pandemic because  it is the only 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.

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