The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted billions of lives and threatens to reverse decades of development gains. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General warns that “the avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunizations could be far greater than COVID-19 itself.” The best way to mitigate the primary and secondary impacts of COVID-19 is to safeguard immunization services and strong health systems and ensure equitable access to future COVID-19 vaccines.
The objective of this side event is to galvanize governments and humanitarian actors to safeguard interrupted immunization campaigns, outline key infrastructure that needs to be in place by the time a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, and highlight the need for global coordination to ensure equitable access to a COVID-19 vaccine. It also seeks to bring visibility to the COVAX Facility as the only current viable and pragmatic way to plan for equitable access and distribution of the future COVID-19 vaccine for all countries, with a focus on the most vulnerable.