Gates Foundation commits additional $150m to battle COVID-19

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced an additional $150 million to its funding for the global response to COVID-19. 

The foundation in a mailed statement said the funds will be deployed to catalyze the rapid procurement of essential medical supplies and help life sciences companies secure financing to produce COVID-19 products.

Announcing the funding, the foundation called on world leaders to unite in a global response to COVID-19 to ensure equitable access to diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.

“It is increasingly clear that the world’s response to this pandemic will not be effective unless it is also equitable,” said Melinda Gates, Gates Foundation co-chair.

“We have a responsibility to meet this global crisis with global solidarity. In addition to contributing to the development of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines, these funds will support efforts against COVID-19 in low-and-middle-income countries, where local leaders and healthcare workers are doing heroic work to protect vulnerable communities and slow the spread of the disease.”

The foundation’s new $150 million commitment is expected to fund “the development of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines, as well as new efforts to provide partners in Africa and South Asia with resources to scale their COVID-19 detection, treatment, and isolation efforts”.

The foundation said it will also leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund, which uses a suite of financial tools to address market failures and incentivize private enterprise to develop affordable and accessible health products.

These funds, which can include equity investments, loans, and volume guarantees, will be used to help health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) facilitate the rapid procurement of personal protective equipment for health care workers, COVID-19 diagnostics, oxygen therapeutics, and other essential medical supplies.

The foundation has also directed its programmatic technical expertise to support multilateral, national, and sub-national responses to the pandemic.

“COVID-19 doesn’t obey border laws. Even if most countries succeed in slowing the disease over the next few months, the virus could return if the pandemic remains severe enough elsewhere,” Bill Gates, foundation co-chair, added.

“The world community must understand that so long as COVID-19 is somewhere, we need to act as if it were everywhere. Beating this pandemic will require an unprecedented level of international funding and cooperation.”

Mark Suzman, the foundation’s CEO, said: “This pandemic has unleashed an extraordinary philanthropic response. While significant, it is still only one small part of what must be a coordinated effort to beat this global crisis”.

“Philanthropy cannot—and should not—supplant the public and private sectors. What philanthropy is good at is testing out ideas that might not otherwise get tried, so governments and businesses can then take on the successful ones.

“With all sectors working together, we can avoid the worst-case scenarios of human, economic, and social costs.”

The foundation’s priority areas for investment include accelerating virus detection, protecting the most vulnerable, minimizing social and economic impact, and developing products for a sustained response.

The foundation had initially committed $100 million to the COVID-19 response globally.