While the Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine Grabs Headlines, Support for Treatments Is Lagging

The search for a Covid-19 vaccine has led the Trump administration to set January 2021 as its deadline for delivering 300 million doses of a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine. More recently, the president claimed it might be ready “right around” the November election. But even if the most optimistic predictions come true and a vaccine is ready soon, equitable distribution on a global scale could take years.

So, beyond wearing masks and physical distancing, what can we do to cope with a virus that has killed more than 172,000 Americans and nearly 780,000 people worldwide?

This crisis will only truly end when we have tests, treatments, and vaccines available for all who need them. That is the only exit strategy.

To make that happen, a huge global collaboration was launched this spring to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator has set out to raise an enormous sum — $31.3 billion — to meet these goals. Yet this pales in comparison to the approximately $375 billion the world economy is losing each month due to the pandemic. In that context, $31.3 billion seems like a shrewd investment.

Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go to reach that amount. Just 11 percent has been donated so far, with the vast majority of donations for coronavirus medical research going to vaccines (76 percent), leaving treatments a distant second at 21 percent, and tests at only 3 percent.

To some extent, this is understandable. Vaccines are portrayed as the silver bullet that will end this pandemic once and for all. But the experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic shows us that while a vaccine is an ideal outcome, we have no guarantees one will work or provide long-term immunity. As long as the coronavirus exists, and it is likely to stick around in some form for many years to come, we need effective treatments to combat it. And we need them fast.

The good news is that researchers are working around the clock, analyzing more than 200 potential treatments and running thousands of studies. This involves screening enormous collections of drugs that have already been tested for safety and could hold promise as coronavirus treatments. In parallel, researchers are conducting clinical trials of existing drugs that could be repurposed to fight Covid-19. Dexamethasone, a type of steroid used to reduce inflammation, was found this way and is the first treatment shown to improve survival in critically ill Covid-19 patients. Many other treatment candidates are in the works.

Misinformation Confuses Potential Donors

Unfortunately, controversy and misinformation characterize some of the most hyped treatments, creating confusion for potential donors. President Trump hailed a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a “miracle” before regulators revoked its emergency authorization because of side effects that outweighed questionable benefits. Remdesivir, a promising treatment originally developed for Ebola, is the subject of ongoing debates about its price tag. In this environment well-funded, well-organized, and equitably delivered treatment programs are critical.

Through the ACT-Accelerator’s Therapeutics Partnership, my organization, Wellcome Trust, and Unitaid, are coordinating an effort to achieve just that. The Therapeutics Partnership, which offers an avenue for donors interested in funding coronavirus treatments, was brought together on behalf of the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, co-founded in March by Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Mastercard.

The therapeutics arm is a long way from reaching the $7.2 billion in funds needed to research, manufacture, and deliver 245 million treatment courses in low- and middle-income countries by mid-2021. Of this, $3.8 billion is needed immediately for research and preparing manufacturing for large-scale, equitable distribution. But so far, just $608 million has been raised, of which 35 percent came from philanthropic and private-sector donations. We are now at serious risk of promising treatments never reaching clinical trials and, ultimately, achieving regulatory approval.

A Philanthropic Disconnect

While governments need to do their share to support treatment research and development, the philanthropic world has a critical role to play as well.

But a disconnect persists between the scale and urgency of the need, and the amount donated so far by wealthy people.

A recent study by Wealth-X shows that only one in 10 of the world’s billionaires have donated to Covid-19 efforts. This is not to say that philanthropy has been completely absent. Candid, a watchdog that tracks charitable giving, estimated that by late April, American foundations, corporations, and individuals had donated at least $5.3 billion in grants to more than 1,200 organizations around the world working on pandemic-related efforts. But the vast majority went to immediate disaster relief and medical services — not scientific research.

The pandemic has renewed attention on philanthropy’s long and celebrated history of partnership with the scientific and medical communities on public-health issues. In the past century, infectious diseases such as smallpox, polio, and yellow fever were eradicated, eliminated, or brought under control thanks in part to philanthropic donations into scientific research. Approximately 80 million Americans donated to research that eventually led to a polio vaccine, a remarkable demonstration of philanthropic giving.

Now is the time for philanthropists to step forward once again, working with governments to help fund the treatments that will finally get life back to normal.