A Proposal to End the COVID-19 Pandemic
Staff Discussion Notes, May 19, 2021
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Bibliographic details
- Authors: Ruchir Agarwal, Gita Gopinath
- Published: May 19, 2021
- Series: Staff Discussion Notes
Summary
- Urgent steps are needed to arrest the rising human toll and economic strain from the COVID-19 pandemic that are exacerbating already-diverging recoveries.
- Pandemic policy is economic policy: there is no durable end to the economic crisis without an end to the health crisis.
- The paper proposes pragmatic national and multilateral actions to expeditiously defeat the pandemic, building on existing initiatives.
Key targets and timeline
- Vaccinate at least 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021.
- Vaccinate at least 60 percent of the population in all countries by the first half of 2022.
- Track and insure against downside risks.
- Ensure widespread testing and tracing, maintain adequate stocks of therapeutics, and enforce public health measures in places where vaccine coverage is low.
Costs, financing needs, and proposed burden sharing
- Estimated global benefits of the proposal: about $9 trillion.
- Estimated costs of the proposal: around $50 billion.
- Of the $50 billion, $35 billion should be paid by grants from donors.
- The residual should be paid by national governments potentially with the support of concessional financing from bilateral and multilateral agencies.
- The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator identifies a grant funding gap of about $22 billion, which the G20 recognizes as important to address.
- This leaves an estimated $13 billion in additional grant contributions needed to finance the proposal.
- The strategy requires global cooperation to secure:
- upfront financing,
- upfront vaccine donations,
- at-risk investment to insure against downside risks for the world.
Complementary measures and implementation priorities
- Tracking and insuring against downside epidemiological and economic risks.
- Widespread testing and tracing where vaccine coverage is low.
- Maintaining adequate stocks of therapeutics.
- Enforcing public health measures in places with low vaccine coverage.
- Leveraging concessional financing from bilateral and multilateral agencies to support national government residual costs.
Rationale and expected payoff
- The proposal emphasizes that timely, coordinated global action to expand vaccine coverage and support public-health responses will avert large human and economic costs.
- The magnitude of the benefits (about $9 trillion) far outweighs the estimated costs (around $50 billion), supporting strong multilateral investment and grant-financed support for low-coverage countries.
Source: A Proposal to End the COVID-19 Pandemic, Staff Discussion Notes No. 2021/004
Content in this bundle
- sdnea2021004 — Executive summary and proposal to end the COVID-19 pandemic