Medical Research Funding
The Indian company Serum Institute has announced that its Covid-19 vaccine once developed and approved will have a ceiling price of $3 per dose for India and low-and-middle-income countries. Serum is the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume and has now received at-risk funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. The money will be used to produce possible candidates for vaccines.
The German Health Minister Jens Spahn has announced that Germany will increase its contribution to the funds of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 to over €500 million in total. He stated that "We need a strong, transparent and accountable WHO today more than ever" and that "We stand together in fighting global health problems".
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that the White House has ordered to cancel funding for the Covid-19 research. Fauci stated "It was cancelled because the NIH was told to cancel it" and clarified to Politico that the White House gave the instructions. The project had been studying how Covid-19 could spread from bats to humans.
During an outdoor prayer service with around 130 attendees, Pope Francis has urged politicians to move funds from weapons towards medical research in order to prevent the next pandemic. Most of the invited people were directly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and most of them wore masks during the prayer service except when leading prayers at the microphone. The Pope himself sat separated from the others and did not wear a mask himself.
In his Sunday briefing, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccine by the University of Oxford were progressing well. The trial is currently in phase one and all participants have received their doses. Oxford has received over £47 million by the government so far and Sharma announced another £84 million in new funding.
Sharma added: "This means that if the vaccine is successful AstraZeneca (a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company) will work to make 30 million doses available by September for the UK as part of an agreement for over 100 million doses in total."