A high-level panel finds too little progress is being made to prepare the world for another pandemic, but there's a fix for that: cultivating trust.
"The trust deficit between and within countries is a key barrier to improving preparedness," the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board concluded in a new report launched in Geneva on Monday.
"Restoring trust is a long-term exercise," it noted, but trust-building efforts could begin now to make governance more inclusive, engage civil society, improve preparedness "closer to the populations most in need" and boost health monitoring "as the foundation of mutual accountability."
The 17-member expert panel co-convened by the World Health Organization and World Bank was established in 2018 as a high-level platform for political advocacy because, its founders said, the global response to many previous health emergencies showed the world was caught in a cycle of panic and neglect.
That was before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. And, despite the unprecedented speed with which effective COVID-19 vaccines and treatments were developed, billions of people in the least-developed nations did not benefit.
"Today, we find that despite some improvement, preparedness remains perilously fragile," the board's co-chairs, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, a former president of Croatia, and Joy Phumaphi, a former Botswana health minister, said in a foreword.
"We know in theory how to stop a pandemic in its tracks, but in practice, the gaps in preparedness leave us dangerously exposed to a future threat," they said. "Geopolitical tensions and pervasive mistrust are weakening the resolve needed to close these gaps."
The report cited some progress in financing with a new Pandemic Fund and more R&D capacity, particularly an mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa.
But it said too much funding depends on charitable donations, nations aren't spending enough to prepare, and rich nations still dominate vaccine-making.
"The creation of a Pandemic Fund has been a welcome addition," it said, "but its available funding is far short of the US$10 billion originally proposed for such a fund." So far the fund has drawn US$1.66 billion in donations mainly from the European Union and the United States, along with Germany, Italy, Japan, France, China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Canada, according to the World Bank.
Another culprit is the confusion caused by misinformation about health measures and vaccines, harming the most vulnerable among us. COVID-19 had "hugely different outcomes within countries across gender, age, race and ethnicity, especially for vulnerable groups," the report found.
As a result "there is no consistent global effort to tackle these inequities," it said. "The increasingly fragmented information environment as well as misinformation and disinformation is undermining trust between citizens, governments and the private sector but efforts to tackle this problem do not have the required structure, reach or scale."
Unsurprisingly, the panel urges nations to complete their negotiations on a legally binding pandemic accord and adopt it at the next World Health Assembly, which governs WHO, in 2024. As co-convener of the panel, the U.N. health agency also oversees the negotiations.
"This legally binding instrument will be central to stronger preparedness, and WHO member states need to maintain their resolve to deliver an ambitious, comprehensive and effective WHO pandemic agreement," the panel said.
