WASHINGTON: The Gates Foundation and British biomedical charity Wellcome on Tuesday pledged $150 million in the fight against COVID-19 and to prepare for future pandemics.

$300 million will go to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a global partnership established five years ago that co-operates with the World Health Organization and Gavi, the vaccine as well as Covax, an initiative to distribute COVID vaccines in the developing world. - Leads. Treaty.

British scientist Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome's director, said in a press briefing, "None of us believe that Omicron will be the final version, or that COVID-19 will be the final pandemic."

"We really need a global response," he said, urging governments to step up their contributions.

The announced investment is only a small fraction of CEPI's new five-year action plan, which calls for $3.5 billion.

A conference in London next March should help raise the target amount.

Established in 2017 after the Ebola pandemic, CEPI has made a major contribution to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

It has provided funding for 14 vaccine projects, including AstraZeneca, Moderna and Novavax.

"Those vaccines saved a lot of lives and went out very quickly," Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told reporters.

But the picture is mixed, he said, and "we didn't get the quantity to developing countries as quickly as we wanted."

One of the major goals of CEPI is to reduce the time taken to develop life-saving vaccines against any new viral threat to within 100 days after the pathogen is sequenced.

"As we did in 2020, the delivery of vaccines in 11 months was unprecedented. But it certainly wasn't good enough," said CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett.

"The unprecedented spread of the highly infectious Ommicron variant around the world over the past two months is an example of the ways in which we must prepare for both the speed and the scale of our response to respond to future threats," he said.