European governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pledged to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funds for a global effort aimed at ensuring eventual virus vaccines are quickly available to poor countries.
The pledges announced Thursday in Paris will go to vaccine development and distribution efforts coordinated by the World Health Organization. That includes Covax, an ambitious but troubled global project to buy and deliver coronavirus vaccines to the world’s poorest people once they are ready.
The United States, China and Russia are not taking part. None of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines has completed advanced testing, but several might have data to present in the coming weeks.
