EU to donate 100mn vaccine doses to COVAX scheme

She announced the move at the Global Health Summit, a special online meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) of industrialized and emerging economies organised by the European Commission and Italy, DPA news agency reported.

The COVAX programme is a World Health Organization-backed effort to deliver coronavirus vaccines for the world's neediest people, however it has been beset by shortages of doses.

The EU would also spend 1 billion euros ($1.21 billion) to support the construction of vaccine production plants in Africa, von der Leyen said.

The coronavirus crisis had shown the importance of international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said in his opening speech.

The EU and Italy, which currently holds the G20 presidency, are hosting the summit to enable participants to exchange insights gained during the pandemic.

The goal of the online meeting was to agree on the "Rome Declaration," a paper setting guidelines for preventing future health crises and ensuring better preparation for such cases.

The declaration lays out 16 principles that G20 countries agreed to, including promising more cooperation and better vaccine distribution.

In light of the dispute over waiving vaccine patents, von der Leyen said that the pandemic has shown how important those rights are for speeding up production and said the EU plans to clarify the use of licences in crisis times with a World Trade Organization proposal.

Von der Leyen hinted that the EU proposal could be a kind of middle ground, after US President Joe Biden had pushed for waiving the rights, to which the European Union refused to give its backing.

According to a statement, the G20 countries also want to set up an early warning system to share information about possible pandemics in the future and stressed the importance of open global supply chains.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said experience had shown that the pandemic would only ever be over when everyone had access to jabs.

After the event, Merkel said Germany would donate a further 30 million doses to the COVAX programme, as long as the country was able to secure all those that have been ordered. Germany will also give another 100 million euros to COVAX, bringing its total financial support for vaccine assistance to 1 billion euros, she said.

During the summit, many speakers pointed to Africa, where the inoculation campaign is progressing slowly and vaccine supplies are slim, not least because the G20 member states had acquired large amounts for themselves.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of the damage the coronavirus could cause during the months ahead and called for more equitable access to tests and vaccines.

"The pandemic is still very much with us, thriving and mutating. 

As winter approaches in the Global South, I fear the worst is yet to come," he said.

Several coronavirus vaccine manufacturers also pledged to deliver over 1 billion doses to countries in need by the end of the year, including BioNTech/Pfizer (about 1 billion doses), Moderna (about 95 million doses) and Johnson & Johnson (about 200 million doses).

Deliveries for developing and emerging countries are scheduled to start in the second half of the year. More than 1 billion doses are also to be made available in 2022. According to the plan, the poorest countries will only have to pay the manufacturing costs, while a lower price will apply for developing countries.