How the World's Largest Medical Philanthropy Has Responded to COVID-19 So Far
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PHOTO: WILLIAM BARTON/SHUTTERSTOCK
As the world’s largest medical philanthropy—and with assets of $51.7 billion, one of the largest philanthropic foundations of any kind—the U.K.-based Wellcome has played a high-level role in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wellcome (though it is still often referred to as “Wellcome Trust”; the organization has largely dropped the “Trust” from its name these days) has leveraged its unique mix of deep scientific expertise and deep pockets, along with trust and credibility built over nearly a century in operation, to help enable and drive the international community’s response to the COVID pandemic.
We checked in with the health funder to get a roundup of the foundation’s COVID-related grantmaking and initiatives so far, and its strategy for the coming years.
Wellcome has committed more than $460 million so far in response to COVID since early 2020. A major chunk of that funding—about $200 million—went to research to aid the development of therapeutics and vaccines. Welcome has also announced giving for research into future pandemic response and prevention.
In addition to its funding, Wellcome has played an important role coordinating many players across politics, scientific research, philanthropy and business, and building partnerships. For example, Wellcome has engaged with governments and international health organizations—such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), which Wellcome co-founded with the Gates Foundation—to speed the development of COVID treatments and vaccines. Recall that at the start of the pandemic, an overwhelmed medical community had virtually no idea how best to care for severely sick patients, few effective medicines, and no preventive vaccines at all.
Back in late 2020, when COVID had been spreading for about a year but before vaccines became available, we reviewed Wellcome’s COVID response. Here’s an updated overview of Wellcome’s COVID-related funding and other key initiatives to address the pandemic. There are quite a few strands to keep track of, and probably some other indirect COVID-related giving.
COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator—In collaboration with other philanthropic partners, Wellcome helped establish the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to bring treatments to market more quickly and accessibly.
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI)—Wellcome continues to back CEPI in its research to develop new vaccines to protect against current and future COVID-19 variants. Financial support has included $25 million committed in 2021. More recently, Wellcome and the Gates Foundation announced pledges of $150 million each to CEPI, both to end the COVID-19 pandemic and to prevent pathogenic threats and pandemics.
Clinical trials of potential treatments—Wellcome has granted $37.8 million for research on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 surveillance since the start of the pandemic. This support has included trials of potential treatments and to back the international expansion of the RECOVERY Trial, which searched for and studied possible treatments for patients sick with COVID, including steroids and antiviral medications. Wellcome funded genomic sequencing and SARS-CoV-2 surveillance that have been central in monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and the identification of potentially dangerous new variants like omicron. Along with its longstanding support for the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Wellcome has invested in surveillance capacity in low- and middle-income countries to supplement existing local genomic sequencing capabilities, to aid the creation and training of new teams, and to generate the data necessary to inform the global response.
COVAX and the ACT Accelerator—Wellcome has worked with the WHO, governments and other international organizations to drive the political and financial commitments needed to deliver and distribute vaccines, treatments and tests. Chief among these efforts is Wellcome's work through COVAX and the ACT Accelerator.
(For those who may be suffering from acronym fatigue: COVAX is the vaccine arm of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator. COVAX is led cooperatively by the WHO, CEPI and GAVI. GAVI is a public-private global health partnership that aims to increase access to vaccines in poorer countries. The ACT Accelerator is a global partnership that works to develop, produce and enable globally equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines.)
Protection against future pandemics—According to Wellcome, the pandemic has demonstrated the importance of preparing for infectious diseases before they become a local or global crisis. Going forward, Wellcome will support research to reduce the risk and impact of new and returning infectious diseases, drug-resistant infections and diseases with the potential to evade existing treatments or spark future epidemics.
The fact that COVID remains a serious threat worldwide, however, is a reminder that major philanthropies like Wellcome, the Gates Foundation, governments, and other global health organizations could have invested even more to meet the challenge of the pandemic—especially given the vast endowments of places like Wellcome and Gates.
Wellcome, for its part, does have plans to further increase funding for COVID causes. Following its recent decision to boost its charitable giving for global health to more than $21 billion over the next 10 years—a result, it says, of strong returns on its investment portfolio in the last two decades—it’s reasonable to expect continued growth in giving related to COVID, and other pandemic threats, from this deep-pocketed health funder.
