London: US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said the country is pulling its support from the vaccines alliance Gavi, saying the organisation has “ignored the science” and “lost the public trust.”
A video of Kennedy’s speech was shown to participants at a Gavi meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, where the vaccines group was hoping to raise at least $9 billion for the next five years.
Gavi is a public-private partnership including WHO, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and the World Bank. It has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated through routine immunisation programmes. The US has long been one of its biggest supporters; before Trump’s re-election, the country had pledged $1 billion through 2030.
Kennedy called on Gavi “to re-earn the public trust and to justify the $8 billion America has provided in funding since 2001,” saying officials must “consider the best science available, even when that science contradicts established paradigms.”