End the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dear Friend,

Dedicated supports like you enable UNICEF to be at the forefront of ending the COVID-19 pandemic while doing everything possible to prevent the next one. Investing in UNICEF’s pandemic response means you are helping to ensure that vaccines, tests, treatments and PPE get to the communities and people who need them most. In addition, you are supporting UNICEF to improve health systems in many ways, including strengthening the cold chain and providing further training for health care workers.

Thanks to your support, significant progress has been made in the fight against COVID-19. Over 1.5 billion vaccines have been delivered to 145 countries and territories. With your assistance, UNICEF works with governments, manufacturers, and partners to ensure that when countries receive vaccines, they can get them to people quickly, and turn vaccines into vaccinations. UNICEF and partners are now focused on closing the gap in 34 priority countries so that we can end the pandemic.

It is also critical to strengthen and build resilient health systems globally. While systems strengthening has always been integral to UNICEF’s work, the COVID-19 pandemic has affirmed just how crucial it is. Continuing to support the health sector is critical both to ending the pandemic and addressing a diversity of threats to child survival and development. COVID-19 has threatened decades of hard-won gains for children’s health. Immunizations against preventable diseases like tetanus, polio, and measles have been disrupted. Caregivers held back on seeking care for chronic issues to avoid the risk of a COVID-19 infection. These interruptions exposed the fragility of local and national systems around the world. It’s been a stark reminder of the need to build resilient health systems globally. With your support, UNICEF is strengthening health systems to ensure children all over the world survive and thrive.

As always, thank you for standing with UNICEF USA in our relentless pursuit of an equitable world for children.

Sincerely,

Whitney

Dear Friend,

COVID-19 has changed our world. We have shared a joint struggle to tackle the pandemic’s impact – on lives, communities and economies – and to find new vaccines, diagnostic tools and treatments that will enable us to collectively control the pandemic. As the largest vaccine procurer in the world, UNICEF joined the global ‘Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator’ (ACT-A): a ground-breaking partnership to ensure the equitable supply of lifesaving vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics to people most at risk, around the world.

Thanks to the generosity of donors such as yourself, UNICEF has been able to support countries and regions to drive equitable access to vaccines, tests and treatments. Thanks to flexible funding, UNICEF has been able to direct resources to where they are needed most, in one of UNICEF’s most complex and dynamic global responses in history.

As of February 11th, UNICEF and partners have been able to deliver 1.16 billion COVID1-9 vaccine doses across 144 countries.

In addition, as of February 8, UNICEF has been able to deliver:

• 984.9 million syringes to 97 countries
• 10.4 million safety boxes for the disposal of used syringes to 97 countries
• 429.8 million surgical masks
• 9.3 million molecular diagnostic kits
• 42,688 oxygen concentrators

Thank you for your amazing response to this truly historic effort. It has been critical to help countries prepare as vaccine production ramps up, and we have been encouraged by the strength of the results that UNICEF has been able to achieve with your incredible support. We need to maintain our impetus to make sure that UNICEF is able to reach every low- and middle-income country with support, so that no one is left behind – because no one is safe from this virus, until everyone is safe.

In Partnership, 

Kelly Procida

Dear Friend,

Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it continues to perpetuate an unprecedented health, socioeconomic, and human rights crisis which is taking its toll on the most vulnerable worldwide. The pandemic has threatened hard-won gains to protect and advance children’s rights to adequate health, nutrition and education, and has the potential to cause irreversible damage to the social and emotional development of an entire generation. As of October 19^th, 2021, more than 240.6 million COVID-19 cases and 4.89 million deaths have been reported globally. Yet these figures likely underreport the devastation, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where surveillance, testing capacity and data availability can be limited.

Before the pandemic, UNICEF reached approximately 45 percent of the world’s children under the age of five with vaccines each year. Alongside governments and global partners, UNICEF is committed to ensuring that decades of progress made in child health is not lost due to COVID-19. UNICEF delivers results in the most critical areas through various avenues, including the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A). The ACT-Accelerator is a ground-breaking global collaboration to accelerate development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines - all supported by a strong health system - to reduce mortality and severe disease, restore full societal and economic activity globally.

Despite the significant achievements of the ACT-A collaboration so far, access to COVID-19 tools remains grossly unequal. For example, as of September 13^th, 2021, 0.7 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, compared with 55.3 percent of people in high-income countries. As a lead implementation partner for ACT-A, UNICEF is uniquely placed to address the implementation challenges that exist in low- and middle-income countries and close this equity gap. The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator is the only coordinated multilateral global mechanism designed to equitably reach vulnerable populations around the globe with COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and tests. Through this unprecedented global coordination, UNICEF and partners have:

• Shipped over 378 million COVID-19 vaccines have been shipped to 144 countries as of October 19^th.
• Delivered 92,544 COVID-19 rapid diagnostic tests in the first half of the year; and
• Conducted ACT-A-related risk communication and community engagement activities throughout 73 countries between January and June of 2021.

With your generous commitment to this work, UNICEF and partners will deliver two billion vaccines, 165 million therapeutics and 900 million tests to low and middle-income countries in a safe and equitable way. 

In Partnership,  

Kelly Procida

Dear Friend,

As you likely know, India was hit by a rapid and deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections. Health and critical care facilities were overwhelmed, leaving people without the medical care that they so urgently need. Cases continue to surge at unprecedented rates. On May 1, India recorded the highest ever daily count of new cases, in any country at any stage of this global pandemic, exceeding 400,000 new cases.

With time, the virus is mutating, and different variants are breaking out, affecting more young people and children in the second wave. Given the exponential rise in the COVID-19 caseload that India grappled with, health facilities were faced with the dire risk of not having an adequate supply of oxygen for their patients. This life-saving gas helps patients breathe when they cannot do so on their own – whether it be children with pneumonia or hypoxemia, newborns and mothers with birth complications, or patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, every year 4.2 million children in low and middle-income countries urgently needed medical oxygen to survive.

Thanks to your continued commitment to ending the pandemic, UNICEF has been working tirelessly throughout to help tackle the devastating impact that the virus itself has had, as well as the impact that measures taken to control the virus have had on India’s children and their families. Most recently, this response includes support to the COVID-19 vaccines rollout. As India and other countries around the world face this rapidly worsening ‘second wave,’ UNICEF continues to support governments, WHO and other partners to tackle this fresh crisis and the further impacts it will have on children and families. Your support ensured that UNICEF India was able to achieve the following outcomes over the past several months:

• Increasing access to life-saving oxygen: Oxygen therapy is a critical treatment for patients who are experiencing moderate and severe/critical COVID-19 symptoms. However, just one critically ill COVID-19 patient requires between 25,000-80,000 liters of pressurized oxygen per day for approximately five days. Your support allowed UNICEF to invest in the establishment of 40 new Oxygen Generation plants that can provide enough oxygen for 500 hospital beds as well as 3,000 portable oxygen concentrators to support ill patients.
• Boosting testing capacity: Rapid, accurate testing is an essential tool in the fight against COVID-19. However, growing delays in the processing of “gold standard” RT-PCR tests are jeopardizing timely diagnosis and treatment. With your support, UNICEF helped boost test processing capacity in some of the worst affected districts.

As the pandemic continues to effect communities around the world, your generous financial support will enable UNICEF to swiftly procure the supplies needed to diagnose, treat and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Beyond this current crisis, your investment will leave a lasting legacy that will strengthen India’s health system over the coming 10+ years, improving diagnosis and access to life-saving oxygen that will benefit countless numbers of children and their families. Thank you for continuing to stand with UNICEF as we continue the fight to end the pandemic.

In Partnership,

Whitney

Nearly a year into the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, it continues to perpetuate an unprecedented socioeconomic, humanitarian, and human rights crisis which is taking its toll on the most vulnerable worldwide. The global COVID-19 pandemic is overstretching health systems, exacerbating deep inequities within countries and across regions, and causing children to face widespread disparities. Alongside governments and global partners, UNICEF is committed to ensuring that decades of progress made in child health is not lost due to COVID-19.

With the biggest vaccine procurement, storage, shipping, cold chain and supply network in the world, UNICEF reaches almost half of the world children with over two billion vaccines annually. For this reason, UNICEF has been asked to play a strategic role of leading efforts to procure and supply COVID-19 vaccines for 92 low-income countries and serve as procurement coordinator for more than 90 high-income countries. 

On February 24, Ghana became the first low-resource country to receive free COVID-19 vaccines through this program. “This is a momentous occasion, as the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines into Ghana is critical in bringing the pandemic to an end," said UNICEF Representative in Ghana Anne-Claire Dufay. "The only way out of this crisis is to ensure that vaccinations are available for all. We thank all partners that are supporting the COVAX Facility to deliver safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines to all countries quickly and fairly."

Thanks to your commitment to this work, UNICEF will ship more than 14.5 million syringes to more than 30 countries in the coming weeks. Your continued support will help ensure that in 2021, UNICEF and partners will deliver two billion vaccines, 165 million therapeutics and 900 million tests to low and middle-income countries in a safe and equitable way. As the pandemic continues, UNICEF is working with partners to reimagine and develop a world that is a safer and more equitable place for communities and children everywhere. In the words of UNICEF Executive Director, Henrietta Fore, “what the world looks like for children and young people tomorrow is our collective responsibility today.”

In Partnership,

Whitney

Links:

• First COVID-19 Vaccines Land in Ghana: A Milestone for COVAX