Health DG among signatories of new international coalition to fight Covid-19

CORONAVIRUS | A group of scientists, physicians, funders and policymakers from over 70 institutions and more than 30 countries have come together to form an international coalition to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic in resource-poor settings.

The signatories for the formation of the Covid-19 Clinical Research Coalition include Malaysia’s Health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah and 75 others including nations like Argentina, the United States, France, Ethiopia, Sweden, Thailand and Uganda among others.

According to a comment carried by The Lancet yesterday, the coalition members argue that international research collaboration and coordination are urgently needed to help African, Eastern European, and certain Asian nations to effectively respond to the worsening Covid-19 pandemic.

The coalition said that this could be done by speeding up research adapted to resource-poor settings.

The signatories pledged their commitment to share their technical expertise and clinical trial to accelerate Covid-19 research in resource-poor settings, particularly because very few of the almost 600 registered clinical trials forming part of the World Health Organization (WHO)-led, unprecedented global effort Solidarity trial, are planned in resource-poor settings.

“The scale of the challenge is clearly beyond the scope of any single organization. The coalition will facilitate a coordinated approach so that all data from all regions can be collected in a similar fashion, pooled and shared in real-time.

“This will help countries and the WHO to make rapid evidence-based decisions on policies and practice,” the coalition said.

“Members of the coalition call for specific commitments to ensure access, so that effective new treatments are made available as soon as possible in resource-poor settings and are affordable and readily accessible,” it said.

The coalition said it aimed to achieve this through its bring together an unprecedented array of health experts from public-sector research institutes, ministries of health, academia, non-profit research and development organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international organisations and funders, to work together to find solutions to the pandemic for resource-poor settings. - Mkini