Speeches Shim
USAID Operating Status
Last updated: June 10, 2022
Today, USAID is committing $20 million to launch lifesaving test-and-treat strategies targeting those at the highest risk of contracting COVID-19, while also planning to invest $200 million in a new fund to prevent future pandemics and strengthen health security. To the countries with lower vaccine coverage, the world stands ready to support you. This Summit should make that clear if it wasn’t clear before. Where you show leadership and political will, the global community will work to provide necessary doses and the support to get those doses into arms. The commitments announced here today will provide new momentum to help you accelerate your campaigns.
In March, the Administration requested $22.5 billion in additional COVID-19 response funding, including $5 billion to support the immediate needs of the global COVID-19 response. This global funding would enable a significant expansion of our Global VAX surge efforts to another 20 to 25 countries and other global COVID-19 vaccination priorities, including the rollout of boosters and pediatric doses. With more than 30 countries qualifying as severely undervaccinated, it remains critical to expand the initiative beyond the 11 surge countries we currently support. This request will also enable us to shrink the severe gaps in global access to testing, oxygen capacity, and antiviral treatments—enabling lifesaving services for more than 100 million people—as well as enhanced monitoring of potential or emerging variants.
Failure to continue our supplemental global funding would abdicate U.S. leadership even as the People’s Republic of China continues its transactional approach to pandemic response and global health; it would weaken health systems that are crucial to fighting this and future pandemics; and it would amount to a surrender to the inevitability of dangerous new variants. Failing to provide supplemental global funding would also jeopardize our long-term baseline pandemic preparedness, global health, and health security investments. In sum: it would be a geopolitical, ethical, health security, and economic mistake of historic proportions.
Yesterday, Administrator Samantha Power participated in a virtual fireside chat with David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, at the World Bank Spring Meetings high-level event on Scaling up Vaccine Deployment. They discussed global efforts to turn COVID-19 vaccines into vaccinations, including recent country successes in driving up vaccination rates and examples of progress from USAID’s work in the field. They also discussed what actions are now demanded of all stakeholders, especially to address critical COVID-19 vaccine financing gaps.

The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), continues to build upon its ongoing, robust COVID-19 response in Thailand. Coinciding with World Immunization Week, the two agencies are providing nearly three million syringes and associated vaccine delivery supplies to hospitals and health centres to support Thailand’s nationwide COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
On April 19, Administrator Samantha Power met with the President of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina, to discuss the impact of climate change and COVID-19 in Madagascar, as well as ways to strengthen anti-corruption efforts in the country.
Comment
Make a general inquiry or suggest an improvement.