The World Health Organisation, WHO has appointed former Nigerian Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as a Special Envoy of the Access to COVID-19 Tools, ACT Accelerator.
WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, announced the appointment during the launch of the initiative, which he described as a landmark collaboration to accelerate the development, production and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for COVID-19.
The ACT Accelerator brings together the combined power of several organisations to work with speed and scale the shared commitment to ensure that all people have access to all the tools to defeat Coronavirus.
He said WHO is proud to be uniting with many partners to launch the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, or the ACT Accelerator.
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More than 2 million people have been infected by COVID-19 and more than 190,000 of them have died globally with more than a billion people forced to stay at home as the world battles to curb the spread of the disease which was first reported in December 2019.
To combat the pandemic, the WHO DG believes “the world needs these tools, and it needs them fast“.