Garrett W. Brown + David Bell - 6/30
IPAK-EDU Director's Science Webinar
IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar
Monday 6/30 @ 7:00pm Eastern
with/ Garrett Wallace Brown, PhD + David Bell, PhD
“The Pandemic Agreement: Symbolic Consolidation of a New Pandemic Industry”
The following is an excerpt from an article at the Brownstone Institute
You can read the full piece here: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-pandemic-agreement-symbolic-consolidation-of-a-new-pandemic-industry/
The Future of Pandemics and This Agreement
Wenham and Potluru from the London School of Economics estimate that the protracted negotiations on the Pandemic Agreement had already cost over $200 million by May 2024. Of course, this is only a fraction of the public expenditure on preparing for hypothetical future pandemics. The amount of ODA that the WHO, World Bank, and G20 have called for annually would correspond to about five to ten times the annual expenditure on combating tuberculosis – a disease that, according to WHO figures, has killed about as many people in the last five years as Covid-19, and at a much lower average age (representing higher years of life lost).
Although the $10.5 billion a year in development aid for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response is unlikely to materialise, even a more cautious increase will come with opportunity costs. Moreover, these financial demands come at an inflection point in global health policy, where development assistance for health (DAH) is under massive pressure from serious stoppages and reductions from the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. Thus, increase in scarcity requires the better use of health financing, not simply more of the same.
Furthermore, as REPPARE has shown, the alarming statements of pandemic risk by the WHO, World Bank, and G20 are not well-grounded in empirical evidence. This means that the entire basis for the Pandemic Agreement is questionable. For example, the World Bank claims millions of annual deaths from zoonotic diseases, although the figure is less than 400,000 per year in the half-century before the Covid-19 pandemic, extrapolated to the current world population, 95% of which is attributable to HIV. The fact that many more new pathogens are being found today than just a few decades ago is not necessarily evidence of an increased risk, but rather the consequence of increased interest in research and, above all, the use of modern diagnostics and reporting processes.
In many ways, the Pandemic Agreement is just a figurehead of a new pandemic industry that has already grown more robust in the last five years. This includes, for example, projects for pathogen surveillance, for which the Pandemic Fund set up at the World Bank in 2021 has already received $2.1 billion in donor commitments while raising almost seven billion for implementation (when additionality is calculated). In 2021, the WHO Pandemic Hub was opened in Berlin, where data and biological material from all over the world are collated as an early warning system for pandemics. In Cape Town, the WHO mRNA hub seeks to promote international technology transfer.
And the 100 Days Mission, driven primarily by the public-private partnership CEPI, aims to ensure that vaccines are available in just 100 days during the next pandemic, which not only requires substantial investment in R&D and production facilities, but also a further speeding up of clinical trials and emergency use authorisation, posing potential risks regarding vaccine safety.
The REPPARE Project
Spurred on by experience in global health research, and as a participant in the preparation of WHO reports related to Pandemic Preparedness Response (PPR), Garrett Wallace Brown, together with David Bell, founded the REPPARE Project (Re-Evaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda) out of the University of Leeds. They have been working to closely examine the underpinnings of the PPR agenda.
Garrett Wallace Brown
Garrett Wallace Brown is Chair of Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds. He is Co-Lead of the Global Health Research Unit and will be the Director of a new WHO Collaboration Centre for Health Systems and Health Security. His research focuses on global health governance, health financing, health system strengthening, health equity and estimating the costs and funding feasibility of pandemic preparedness and response. He has conducted policy and research collaborations in global health for over 25 years and has worked with NGOs, governments in Africa, the DHSC, the FCDO, the UK Cabinet Office, WHO, G7 and G20. Garrett is Co-Principal Investigator on the REPPARE project.
David Bell
David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modeling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva and worked on infectious diseases and coordinated malaria diagnostics strategy at the World Health Organization. He has worked for 20 years in biotech and international public health, with over 120 research publications. David is based in Texas and is the Co-Principal Investigator on the REPPARE project.
Learn more about REPPARE here:
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