A REGIONAL COVID RESPONSE NEEDS MORE FROM AUSTRALIA

Media Release | 23 September 2021

Pacific Friends of Global Health welcomes the news that the Australian Government has pledged an additional 40 million COVID-19 vaccines for the Indo-Pacific region. Australia has now promised a total of 60 million vaccines by the end of 2022.

The announcement was made at a virtual COVID19 Leaders’ Summit, convened by President Biden, as part of a push from the US to see 70% of the world’s population vaccinated within a year.

Chair of Pacific Friends, Prof Brendan Crabb AC said:

“The Biden Leaders’ Summit signalled that the world is perhaps finally beginning to fully appreciate the importance and urgency of ending COVID for every country, not just the most wealthy.

“In this spirit, Australia has taken another hugely welcome and important step to ensure that our neighbours in the Indo-Pacific will get access to a safe, and effective COVID19 vaccine.

“But ‘vaccines’ is not the same as ‘vaccination’. Getting vaccines delivered into the arms of those who need them will require just as big of a support effort as supplying the vaccines themselves.

“PNG is a strong case in point where delivery is turning out to be an even bigger barrier than supply. While Australia has made strong regional commitments to help in this regard there is much more to do here.

“We also know that, especially with the Delta variant, vaccines are crucial but not enough. They are one of multiple lines of defence that are needed to fight this virus.

“We need to ensure that all countries are armed with effective and ample tests to identify cases and curb spread, life-saving treatments such as oxygen to help save the lives of those infected, sufficient PPE to keep healthcare workers safe, and strong health care systems to be able to manage ongoing outbreaks and ensure that delivered vaccines can get from the tarmac into arms.

“Global cooperation is key, and the mechanism to rapidly deliver these tools – the Access to COVID Tools (ACT) Accelerator – already exists. This groundbreaking collaboration is working with governments, scientists, global health organisations, manufacturers and more to accelerate access to these tools for countries who can’t procure them themselves. But it is dismally underfunded, and Australia’s commitments are well below our counterparts in the US, UK, Canada and more.

“We urge the Australian Government to make a fair-share commitment of $250 million to the ACT

Accelerator’s vaccines arm, COVAX. We also call on them to commit a further $170million to the mechanism’s urgent appeal to scale up access to tests, treatments, equipment and more to respond

to the spread of Delta.

“Fighting this pandemic requires using every tool in the toolkit. Without that, millions more people around the world will become ill with this virus, millions more will die, and the whole world remains vulnerable to new emerging variants and the health, economic and social impacts that flow from this ever present threat. The longer we delay action, the further away the end to this pandemic gets from us. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s the smart thing to do.”

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Media Contact

Kate Sieper | 0466 745 615 | kate@impactgroupinternational.com

ABOUT PACIFIC FRIENDS OF GLOBAL HEALTH

Pacific Friends of Global Health (“Pacific Friends”) raises political and public awareness of key global health issues facing the Indo-Pacific Region, and advocates to improve regional health outcomes through Australian Government investment to three of the world’s most significant global health organisations; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (“the Global Fund”), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (“Gavi”) and UNITAID.

Pacific Friends is hosted in Australia by the Australian Global Health Alliance.