but in terms of what you need, are there real shortages and how are you actually getting all the equipment that you need? basically we wanted to start fast so we couldn t rely on waiting for some money from some some funds or organizations. so we started a crowd funding campaign so people were donating money to our project. and we were able to buy the equipment, materials to run this process. so basically now we need to scale up to deliver enough help that would be any of. so this is a huge demand now on housing in western ukraine. so we really need to go to five, ten, 20 projects simultaneously now. and we need people, we need money, we need equipment.
call out for more donations? actually meduza right now is the biggest russian independent media outlet that actually keeps covering the war in ukraine and can reach out to people in russia because as many russian independent publications we were blocked during the war, however, we ve been prepared for that for so many years, we ve been thinking that we re going to be blocked at some point and eventually it happened. but also the war and the western sanctions crushed our crowd funding campaign. before the war we had 33,000 regular supporters in russia and now we can t get any money from russia anymore. so what we did a couple weeks ago, we tried we established crowd funding focused on western audiences on people who live in europe and in the united states and we are asking these people
the chemicals to actually make it work. they cost about $900 for just a couple of hundred test samples. in a given month, they say thousands are needed to fully track the virus. recently, we started a crowd funding campaign and so far, we raised around 400 euros. in the philippines, as well. ed is 1,000 is like two people s monthly salary. it s not insignificant here. reporter: that relatively small funding gap is a big reason why developing countries are lagging so far behind in identifying covid-19 variants that might be more deadly or more transmissible. in the west, labs like the uk sanger institute are sequencing the virus on a huge scale, using multi-million dollar machines like these. according to the global covid variant database, the biggest contributions are coming from the richest countries. some countries haven t sequenced any genomes at all.
A plea was posted on social media platforms on Saturday asking members of the public to make a contribution - further fuelling speculation that the ruling party is in financial difficulty.