A LANDMARK collaboration to quicken the development, production and distribution of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics for Covid-19 to all those who need them has been launched by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Global leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, yesterday joined the agency by video conference to give their backing to the initiative.

It is aimed at speeding up the development of safe and effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent, diagnose and treat Covid-19, the lung disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and ensure equal access to them for rich and poor.

As the virtual meeting got under way, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, said: “The world needs these tools and needs them fast. We are facing a common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach.

“Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Von der Leyen said the objective of a global pledging effort early next month would be to raise €7.5 billion (£6.5bn) to speed up work on prevention, diagnostics and treatment. She said: “This is a first step only, but more will be needed in the future.”

Macron told the conference: “We will continue now to mobilise all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative. And I hope we’ll manage to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US, because this is about saying: the fight against Covid-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.”

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Cyril Ramaphosa, chairman of the African Union, warned that the continent – with its generally poor standards of health care – was “extremely vulnerable to the ravages of this virus and is in need of support”.

Leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the Americas also joined the video conference, but a spokesperson for the US mission in Geneva earlier told Reuters that the United States would not be involved.

“There will be no US official participation,” they said in an email response to a query. “We look forward to learning more about this initiative in support of international cooperation to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 as soon as possible.”

President Donald Trump has already criticised WHO for being slow to react to the outbreak and being “China-centric”. He also announced a suspension of funding.

Tedros has defended the agency’s handling of the outbreak and repeatedly committed to conducting a post-pandemic evaluation, as the WHO does with all crises.

More than 100 potential Covid-19 vaccines are currently being developed, including six already in clinical trials, said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, a public-private partnership that leads immunisation campaigns in poor countries.

“We need to ensure that there are enough vaccines for everyone, we are going to need global leadership to identify and prioritise vaccine candidates,” he told a Geneva briefing before taking part in the formal announcement.

Berkley said global manufacturing capacity must be ramped up ahead of choosing “a winner” vaccine, and that GAVI and the World Bank were looking at the issue.

“We can’t have a repeat of what happened in 2009 – the H1N1 vaccine, when there was not enough supply for developing countries or when supply did come it came much later.”