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Global health experts have united in a call for governments and international organisations around the world to plan strategically for the coordinated production, equitable distribution and surveillance of COVID-19 medical products to ensure access to quality-assured medications for everyone.

Coronavirus close-up © NIH

The comment piece, published in The Lancet Global Health, was signed by 55 signatories from across 20 countries.

Enormous emergency efforts are underway to find optimal medical products, to prevent, diagnose, and treat COVID-19, which approximately 7.8 billion people will depend on. With significant disruption of pharmaceutical production and supply, and increasing numbers of falsified and substandard products, strategic planning is needed now to ensure global access to quality-assured medical products and monitoring of supply chains.

Co-author Professor Paul Newton, who leads Medicine Quality at IDDO, said: ‘Vital interventions are needed to ensure global manufacture, access, protection, and monitoring of supply chains.

The full story is available on the IDDO website