Ensure global and equitable access to vaccines, tests, treatments, and PPE.

The UK Government must aim to make 2022 the year we end this pandemic and #VaccinateTheWorld, through expanding its efforts to ensure global and equitable access to vaccines, tests, treatments, and PPE.

This must be done in partnership with individual countries or through the WHO-hosted Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator partnership of leading global health agencies.

The omicron variant has shown that the British people will never be safe until everyone is safe.

Letting the pandemic go on could cost the global economy $5.3 trillion. Failing to meet the WHO 70% vaccination target could result in 5 million deaths worldwide.

In years to come, we will have to justify this catastrophic moral and global health security failure to our children and grandchildren.

Or we can rewrite history.

We can make 2022 the year our nation helped #VaccinateTheWorld.

The UK’s G7 Presidency last year set the collective goal of ending the pandemic in 2022. The Government is actively working with the G7 and multilateral partners to deliver on this and has made significant contributions to support these efforts.

The Government’s commitment of up to £1.4 billion to help end the COVID pandemic and address its impact includes up to £813 million of new UK Aid to Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator partners, and up to £105 million of support to help vulnerable countries respond to the Omicron variant, as announced by the Foreign Secretary in December 2021.

UK support for global vaccine access is driven through our support for the COVAX Facility. We are among the largest donors to COVAX’s Advance Market Commitment (AMC), committing £548 million, which supports vaccine access for up to 92 developing countries. Over 1.3 billion vaccines have now been delivered globally through COVAX to 144 participants, including over 1 billion to 86 AMC-eligible countries.

As of 7 April, the UK has donated 36 million vaccines to more than 30 countries. A further 32 million doses have been committed to COVAX, to be delivered in the near future. G7 leaders committed to share and finance one billion doses at the G7 Carbis Bay Summit in June 2021.

The UK is also supporting continued innovation to develop the next generation of vaccines. The UK hosted the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit in early March, which raised over US$1.5 billion to support the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) efforts to develop vaccines against new health threats in 100 days and rapidly scale-up manufacturing to strengthen global supply. This includes a UK pledge of £160 million. This significant down-payment towards CEPI’s five-year plan will fund work to save millions of lives, prevent trillions of pounds in economic damage and ensure the world comes out of the COVID-19 pandemic stronger for the future.