Gavi secures $4.8 billion in funding pledges for Covax scheme

The global vaccine alliance Gavi has secured $4.8 billion in funding pledges for the vaccine-sharing scheme Covax, an official said on Friday, falling just shy of its target. "It is really putting us in a very comfortable position," Marie-Ange Saraka-Yao, MD for resource mobilisation at Gavi, told a virtual media briefing.

The group had previously said it needed an additional $5.2 billion to continue delivering vaccines at scale as part of its global plan that delivers shots to poorer countries. Saraka-Yao said $2.1 billion of the total had come from innovative finance instruments, $1.7 billion from sovereign pledges from individual countries, and $1 billion from multilateral development banks.

Covax has delivered 1.42 billion doses to 145 countries. Scaling up deliveries through Covax is seen as critical to meeting a WHO target to vaccinate 70% of the population in poorer nations by mid-2022.