The European Commission announced that it will contribute €700 million to the next funding cycle of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at the G7 One Health Summit in Lyon on Tuesday.

This was one of several pledges made at the summit, as the World Bank, vaccine alliance Gavi, governments, philanthropies and private companies made commitments to improve the health of humans, animals and plants.

Jozef Síkela, European Commissioner for International Partnerships, told the summit that Europe was able to commit €185 million to the Global Fund for the first year to kickstart the €700 million allocation. 

The Commission had been expected to announce its commitment at the Fund’s executive board meeting in February, but is facing intense pressure from its members amid the worsening global security situation.

Síkela also announced a €46.5 million commitment to health security in Africa and Europe, involving a partnership between the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), Africa CDC and the European Food Safety Authority.

The European Commission is also investing €30 million in research and development (R&D) to combat antimicrobial resistance, and €20 million in R&D for new dengue treatments.

The World Bank intends to invest $750 million for One Health activities, its vice-president for development finance, Akihiko Nishio, told the summit.

The Bank will also strengthen the One Health implementation of regional health programmes in West and Central Africa.

Boost for vaccine development

Gavi executive director Dr Sania Nishtar told the summit she would ask her board to approve up to $200 million for upstream support to boost African vaccine manufacturing at its July meeting. 

Gavi has already pledged $1 billion to the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator (AVMA) to promote commercial vaccine manufacturing on the continent. 

Gavi is also allocating $380 million to a “resilience mechanism to ensure that immunisation is at the heart of the response to crises in fragile settings”, Nishtar added.

Later in the summit, the South African generic drug company, Aspen, announced that it intends to prequalify two childhood vaccines, the hexavalent and pneumococcal vaccines, and start to manufacture these for the continent by the end of the year.

Aspen’s Dr Stavros Nicolaou said that his company would also start producing human insulin with Novo Nordisk by May to address the “sinister” explosion of type 2 diabetes.

Climate change

Opening the summit, co-chair French President Emmanuel Macron reminded delegates that “75% of emerging infectious diseases come from animals and that figure is sufficient justification for this meeting”.

The COVID-19 pandemic “became a global phenomenon in just the space of a few weeks,” he added, urging collaboration and a convergence of global and country-based strategies to address One Health.

“Progress must be based on science, which is free, open and independent,” Macron stressed.

Co-chair President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana told the summit that there is an “overwhelming surge of health threats across borders.”

 “Every species is in the crosshairs – animals, humans and plants. And the environmental catastrophe confronting us is in the waves of the sea. It’s in the glaciers. It’s in the rainforests. It’s in the desert storms. 

“In Ghana, a blight of disease and pests affects smallholder cocoa farmers, threatening millions of households. Illegal gold mining leads to forest degradation and pollution of our water bodies, threatening the survival of precious populations of birds and insects critical to our biodiversity. And the foundation of all these crises is the phenomenon of climate change.”

Mahama stressed that “everything is interconnected, from the outbreak of infectious diseases to antimicrobial resistance, and from climate-related disruptions to food systems.”

However, these risks are converging and intensifying in “frequency, complexity and severity” more than at any time in human history. 

“The One Health approach is thus a practical matter for us. In Africa, we traditionally lived our lives in lockstep with nature. We’re an integral part of nature. More than 50% of our population relies on herbs and other natural forest resources for their medicines,” he said.

“Our lived experience leads us to accept without question that human survival, animal wellbeing and plant health and environmental care form a single interconnected system.”

Echoing Mahama’s experience, Botswana’s President Duma Gideon Boko, also warned of the impact of climate change: “We’ve now begun to experience floods even in areas that were desert. It’s very strange, and it has undermined our climate-resilient infrastructure.” 

Role of philanthropy

Wellcome Trust CEO John-Arne Røttingen reported on a declaration on One Health developed by philanthropy.

This is based on three pillars, he added.

The first is to sustain investment in product development. The second is applying a One Health lens on this, particularly in the context of climate change.

Third, while philanthropies “are really proud to play a role in the system that’s dear to our heart… our role is only catalytic, complementary and driving collaborations”, said Røttingen.

“We are, as philanthropy, committed to partnerships, to collaborate. We need to tackle climate change. We need to tackle the infectious disease threats that are linked to climate change and to the One Health agenda, but we can only do it in partnership; in collaboration with governments, with industry, and civil society.”