Coronavirus: Vaccination

(asked on 1st February 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the UK's (a) financial and (b) vaccine transfer commitments are to the World Health Organisation’s COVAX programme.


Answered by
Nadhim Zahawi Portrait
Nadhim Zahawi
This question was answered on 17th February 2021

The United Kingdom remains committed to ensuring equitable access to effective vaccines as demonstrated by our £548 million contribution to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment - the international initiative to support global equitable access to vaccines. Through match funding, the commitment was leveraged to encourage other donors to commit $1 billion in 2020. The COVAX facility will aim to begin delivery by the end of February 2021 and we are working with international partners to support its rollout.

It is too early to determine how many doses of the vaccines that the UK has ordered will not be needed for domestic use. We are working through multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations and G20, as well as the World Health Organization and other international partners like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance to support vaccine development, manufacturing scale-up and distribution to meet domestic and international needs both now and in the future.

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