The Lancet "At a time of desperate uncertainty, the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) was established in April, 2020, just 3 months after WHO declared COVID-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Consisting of ten UN agencies and global health organisations, The World Bank, Wellcome, and the Gates Foundation, ACT-A aimed to develop health products for COVID-19 and to ensure their equitable distribution, while helping health systems with delivery. (...) Based on 101 interviews with key informants, it
concluded that the design was “top-down” and several aspects were misconceived. ACT-A afforded
too much influence to donors and corporate partners, global targets were not met, and low and
middle-income countries (LMICs)—the purported beneficiaries of the scheme—were excluded from
conceptualisation. It documents particular dissatisfaction with ACT-A in Africa and Latin America."
