Last week, the Economist Impact's health policy and insights team participated in the World Health Summit (WHS). Our head of practice, David Humphreys, moderated a keynote discussion on pandemic preparedness and a workshop on our recently published country-level pandemic response toolkit. Here our team provides some reflections from the WHS:
Rethinking how we prepare for pandemics
Preparedness traditionally related to capacity such as the numbers of ICU beds and laboratories, whereas covid-19 showed that how we mobilise these capacities is what really matters. Intangible elements like political will, especially at the interface of political and scientific decision making, proved crucial. Dr. Ricardo Leite Baptista, a Member of the Portuguese National Parliament, described how cross-party collaboration supported the Portuguese response.
Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Trust, described a shift from “preparedness” to “prevention” to stop epidemics early and prevent or mitigate pandemics, including by connecting animal and human health (“one health”). A whole of government response was emphasised by Juan Palo Uribe of the World Bank because, although budgets are siloed in different departments, the impact of pandemics is shared. Mari Pangestu of the World Bank stressed that long-term health investment is a prerequisite of health security and resilience.
Sustaining and developing innovative partnerships
Covid-19 triggered unprecedented levels of global data sharing; Bernd Montag from Siemens Healthineers emphasised that not sharing data must now be seen as a problem. Chile learned from the early experiences that European countries shared, emphasised Miguel O’Ryan from the University of Chile. Natalie Kanem of UNFPA emphasised that multilateral organisations play a significant role in shaping how the world reflects and changes in response to covid-19, especially when considering equity.
Thomas Triomphe described innovative partnerships that enabled Sanofi to share its manufacturing capacity with other vaccine manufacturers within hours rather than months or even years. Catherine Duggan of the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) posed the question 'how do we to sustain this collaborative endeavour long term, especially when co-ordinating capacity across the whole health system?'
The window of opportunity for significant change is closing, the time to learn lessons and act upon them is now, before the world “moves on” from covid-19.
