Proposals for achieving equitable global access for treatments, vaccines and diagnostics

The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO), governments and global health actors as an ‘unprecedented and inclusive partnership’ to address some of the challenges linked with the management of the COVID-19 emergency and the development and delivery of needed treatments, vaccines and diagnostics.

The partnership will need to address and find equitable solutions to several challenges: from the imminent need to develop, test and produce safe and effective tools to explore different ways of funding and pricing; from the scaling up manufacturing to meet global demand to organising supply chains that ensure health products are distributed fairly and made available to all people, especially the most vulnerable, in all countries and free of charge at the point of care.

This briefing, supported by SOMO, sets out the principles and practices which should be operationalised within ACT-A to maximise the collective effort to ensure maximum global health impact and equitable reach. Specifically, the ACT-A partnership should:

• Implement full transparency and guarantee public accountability from priority setting to delivery;
• Work towards the public common good;
• Guarantee adequate production and fair allocation with a global scope;
• Ensure that COVID-19 health tools will be affordable to healthcare payers and free to the public at the point of care in all countries;
• Guarantee collaboration across initiatives.

Only by integrating those principles and practices and putting the public interest at the core, ACT-A will become a truly unprecedented and inclusive partnership which can contribute to addressing some of the global challenges created by the COVID pandemic.