Technology giant Google announced that it will be funding the COVID-19 vaccines for 250,000 people in several countries including the Philippines through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership that leads the Covax vaccine facility with the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure equitable vaccine access globally. Other beneficiaries include Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, and Laos.

“The presence of vaccines gives us hope that we may be nearing the end of the pandemic but barriers to equitable access exist especially in low- and middle-income countries,” said Bernadette Nacario, country director, Google Philippines. “We hope that through Google’s efforts and partnership with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, we can help more people from countries in need to be vaccinated. We also remain committed to helping build public trust in vaccines through raising up timely and trusted information on Search, YouTube, and the rest of our products and platforms as we take down harmful and misleading content.”

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Google will also be leading an employee-giving campaign to secure more vaccine shots with the Gavi Matching Fund and Google.org matching the donation to triple the impact. This is in response to Gavi’s drive for additional funding to provide more countries vaccines launched on April 15.

Vaccine global distribution

To date, the Philippines has already given more than 1.7 million vaccine doses and fully vaccinated more than 214,000 people, according to the scientific publication Our World in Data.

Google.org will be providing Gavi pro-bono technical assistance to accelerate global distribution as part of its continued efforts to provide correct and reliable vaccine-related insights.

Google is also committing $250 million in ad grants to governments and public health organizations including the WHO to aid them in spreading vaccine-related information. This amounts to 2.5 billion public service announcements meant to reach more people in more communities around the world.

In the Philippines, Google has taken part in the Department of Health’s #ChecktheFAQs campaign together with other tech companies to fight vaccine misinformation alongside taking down harmful and misleading content across its products.