Attachments
Foreword and notes
This document is intended for countries, foundations, and civil society. It provides a consolidated overview of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, its goals, and the investments that partners have calculated are required to carry out its mission.
Emergency responses are dynamic by nature. The ACT-Accelerator will regularly adjust its investment needs and update this document as understanding of COVID-19 epidemiology and additional data on the ACT tools become available. For more detailed analysis on the ACT investments for its work in diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, please refer to the costed plans of the relevant ‘pillar’. At the time of publication, the investments required for the Health Systems Connector pillar were still under development.
Why invest in the ACT-Accelerator?
No-one is safe until everyone is safe.
There is no time to waste in the fight against COVID-19. Millions of people have been infected, hundreds of thousands of people have died, and every month the global economy loses an estimated US$375 billion. Faster and more effective progress on the tools to protect, test and treat is vital. And once developed, these tools must be fairly shared among those most at risk from the disease.
Launched on 24 April 2020, at an event co-hosted by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, the President of France, the President of the European Commission, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator brings together governments, health organizations, scientists, businesses, civil society, and philanthropists. They have joined forces to speed up the end of the pandemic by supporting the development and equitable distribution of the tests, treatments and, vaccines the world needs to save lives, restoring full societal and economic activity globally in the near term, and facilitating high-level control of COVID-19 in the medium term.
Success will depend on scientific endeavour and innovation collaborating and being funded at unprecedented levels. It will be based on the principles of fairness and speed – so that all safe, effective tools to fight COVID-19 can be deployed equitably, not just to those who can pay the most.
To achieve this, the ACT-Accelerator aims to develop essential health products for the fight against COVID-19 and to ensure they are distributed equitably through a rapid and ambitious programme of work to develop, test, bring to market, procure and distribute new diagnostics, drugs and technologies, while taking steps to help ensure health systems can deliver these tools to the people who need them.