World leaders pledged on Friday to accelerate work on tests, drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 and to share them around the globe, but the United States did not take part in the launch of the World Health Organization (WHO) initiative.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were among those who joined a video conference to launch what the WHO had billed as a “landmark collaboration” to fight the pandemic.

The aim is to speed development of safe and effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent, diagnose and treat COVID-19, the lung disease caused be the novel coronavirus – and ensure equal access to treatments for rich and poor.

“We are facing a common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as the virtual meeting got underway.

“Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the objective at a global pledging effort in early May would be to raise 7.5 billion euros ($8.10 billion) to ramp up work on prevention, diagnostics and treatment.

“This is a first step only, but more will be needed in the future,” von der Leyen told the conference.

Macron said: “We will continue now to mobilize all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative. And I hope we’ll manage to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US because this is about saying: the fight against COVID-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.”

Ramaphosa, chairman of the African Union, warned that the continent – with its generally poor standards of health care – was “extremely vulnerable to the ravages of this virus and is in need of support.”

Leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the Americas also joined the videoconference, but a spokesman for the US mission in Geneva had earlier told Reuters that the United States would not be involved.

US President Donald Trump has lambasted the WHO as being slow to react to the outbreak and being “China-centric” and announced a suspension of funding.