The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is designating an additional $150 million to the global fight against COVID-19, bringing its total funding to more than $250 million, and promising to tap its Strategic Investment Fund to help secure medical supplies and finance new products to battle the disease.
The Seattle-based foundation called for a “coordinated, international effort” to ensure that the pandemic doesn’t spread unchecked in low- and middle-income countries in regions including sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The announcement comes as some U.S. hot spots, including the original U.S. epicenter in the Seattle region, make progress in reducing the spread of the disease. It also comes as President Trump moves to cut off funding to the World Health Organization over its response to the initial spread of COVID-19 in China.
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Bill Gates cautioned Wednesday that the domestic battle against COVID-19 is only part of a larger global war against the disease.
“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,” he said in a news release announcing the increased funding. “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.”
Since its first round of funding in February, the Gates Foundation has been monitoring the situation to determine where it can make a difference without duplicating the efforts of other non-profit groups or governments, said Mark Suzman, the Gates Foundation CEO, a veteran of the foundation who succeeded Sue Desmond-Hellmann in the role in February.
“Clearly, the scale of the global response is fundamentally different to where it was at the beginning of February,” Suzman said in an interview Wednesday with GeekWire, citing initiatives including government stimulus programs and spending on social and economic initiatives. “But at the same time, we still see some important gaps that need to be filled.”
The foundation says it will focus on four areas: 1) accelerating testing and detection of the virus; 2) rolling out and testing new protections from the disease in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; 3) boosting food assistance and social payment systems in low- and middle-income countries; and 4) supporting the development of new COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.
The foundation’s earlier COVID-19 funding initiatives include a $50 million contribution to a $125 million COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator along with Wellcome and Mastercard. The Gates Foundation also contributed $5 million to the Seattle area’s response to COVID-19. That includes supporting the Seattle Flu Study, and the affiliated Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN, to pilot nasal swab tests for COVID-19.
“A cheap, accurate RDT, rapid diagnostic test, is one of the things that we are trying to work to support,” Suzman said. “It will be critical, not just in the United States, but actually this is going to be a fundamental building block across the world because, until we have that vaccine solution, being able to test at volume, including in many of those developing countries … is going to be the critical step to getting back to some semblance of normality.”
COVID-19 cases have now surpassed 2 million globally, with more than 133,000 deaths, largely concentrated in Asia, Europe, and the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.
