Announcing an extra $150 million of funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help speed the development of treatments, vaccines and public health measures to tackle the new coronavirus outbreak, Melinda Gates said the WHO was “exactly the organization that can deal with this pandemic”.
“De-funding the WHO makes absolutely no sense during a pandemic. We need a global coordinated response,” Gates, who co-chairs the foundation with the billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, said in a telephone interview.
“When you’re in a crisis like this, it’s all hands on deck.”
Melinda Gates added pulling funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) is a dangerous and nonsensical move when the world is facing the health crisis brought by the COVID-19 disease pandemic.
President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday a halt in U.S. funding to the WHO, saying it had “failed in its basic duty” in allowing the pandemic to take hold.
The Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the WHO behind the United States. Melinda Gates said earlier that cutting WHO funding in a health crisis was “as dangerous as it sounds”.
The philanthropic Gates Foundation’s new $150 million commitment brings its COVID-19 funding for the international response to date to $250 million, but Gates said any gap left in the WHO’s funding would be very hard for others to fill.
The $150 million of extra funding adds to an initial $100 million from the Gates Foundation designed to kick-start scientific and public health projects.
Gates said the Foundation is backing eight projects seeking potential solutions for COVID-19 vaccine development and has co-funded enhanced virus detection capacity in Africa as well as contributing to the response in China.
Read more via Reuters
