Frederik Kristensen is deputy CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
As world leaders gather this week at the ASEAN and the Group of 20 summits, they must not only demonstrate their determination to protect the world against the continuing ravages of COVID-19, they must also prepare for the next pandemic.
The goal should be nothing less than a future in which epidemic and pandemic diseases no longer pose an existential threat to our ways of life.
COVID-19 spurred tremendous scientific breakthroughs. We saw the development of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine in just over 300 days -- a stunning achievement. But the disease has also exposed unacceptable inequalities in access to these scientific innovations.
Some 6.87 billion doses have been administered globally, but only 3.1% of people living in low-income countries have received at least one dose. This inequity must be urgently redressed to save lives, control the pandemic and reduce the risks of yet more variants emerging.
The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, the World Health Organization-led international consortium for equitable access to vaccines, was created so that COVID-19 vaccines would be available worldwide to both higher- and lower-income countries. Two billion doses are set to be available to lower-income economies via the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) in the first quarter of 2022. But still, more can and must be done to improve vaccine supply for the most vulnerable populations.
Palestinians receive a shipment of doses of COVID-19 vaccine donated by the U.S on Aug. 24: more can and must be done to improve vaccine supply for the most vulnerable populations. © Reuters Japan, a global-health leader, sets a powerful example. It was one of the first countries to join COVAX, the first among the Group of Seven, and has pledged to donate approximately 60 million vaccine doses, as well as providing $1 billion in funding to the COVAX AMC.
Japan was also a founding member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), launched in 2017, as an innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic and civil society organizations to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics.
Early funding from CEPI's partners gave the world an invaluable head start in tackling COVID-19. Specifically, it supported CEPI's 2018 Oxford University investment to develop a vaccine against MERS, a coronavirus similar to that which causes COVID-19, using their ChAdOx technology.
This technology would later be used in the Oxford, AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. CEPI was able to move fast at the outset of the pandemic, investing as early as January 2020 in COVID-19 vaccine R&D, including in vaccine candidates from Moderna and Oxford University.
The coalition has since established multiple partnerships with developers across Asia and it now counts Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea among the ranks of its sovereign partners.
The world is now immeasurably better protected from COVID-19, with multiple safe and effective vaccines in its armory. But the R&D job both for COVID-19 and future pathogenic threats is nowhere near done. Now is the time to intensify our research efforts and build on the scientific advances necessitated by COVID-19 to ensure even faster and more effective responses the next time an unknown pathogen spills over into human populations.
Around 25 viral families are known to infect humans. As devastating as COVID-19 has been, it is by no means the worst-case scenario: a future pathogen could combine efficient transmissibility with a higher case fatality rate.
We must be ready for this scenario, and we must take action now to prevent the next pandemic. CEPI has an ambitious plan to substantially reduce this risk by rapidly advancing vaccine technology while ensuring access, potentially averting millions of deaths and tens of trillions of dollars in future costs to the global economy.
We have set our gaze high, proposing an Apollo mission for the modern age to compress to just 100 days the time it takes to develop and deploy new vaccines against an emerging infectious disease. This ambition is backed by the U.K. under its G-7 presidency.
To appreciate the huge impact this could have, imagine the 100-day timeline in the context of COVID-19: the first doses would have been available by Apr. 20, 2020 when there were only 2.3 million confirmed cases, instead of the first injections occurring on Dec. 8, 2020 when more than 68.7 million cases had been confirmed worldwide.
COVID-19 has revealed critical vulnerabilities in our global health security. Now is the moment to fix these shortcomings. Viral surveillance networks, like the WHO's Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, set up last month in Berlin, need to be expanded.
The world must construct a library of prototype vaccines against the 25 or so viral families known to infect people and rapid-response vaccine technologies will need to be made, which can be quickly adapted to make shots against newly emerging threats.
Just as crucial to rapid vaccine development will be innovations in manufacturing to scale up production, especially in low- and middle-income countries, as well as the establishment of global research networks for lab capacity, assays and preclinical science.
We know this target is bold, but it is achievable. Ultimately, global progress toward the 100-day goal will depend on the right investments and the political will to rise to this challenge. With backing from steadfast partners, CEPI can help transform the world's ability to respond to new threats so that we can end pandemics forever.