Global alert is essential to overcome future pandemics – 10/17/2023 – Balance and Health

A “global early warning system” for dangerous viruses is essential to prevent future pandemics and speed up vaccine development, says the head of an organization tasked with preventing such health crises.

Greater vigilance and cooperation is needed to flag what health experts call “disease Epidemics (Cepi).

Rapid detection is crucial to Cepi’s core goal of accelerating the world’s response to emerging viruses and reducing new vaccine development times to just 100 days.

“We need a global early warning system for disease “This enhanced surveillance must be as global and comprehensive and interconnected as possible.”

Hatchett’s call for an early warning system came shortly after a draft pandemic preparedness treaty — which is being negotiated at the World Health Organization — was sent to member states.

The leaked draft, seen by the Financial Times, includes measures to help boost production during a global health crisis. But the pharmaceutical industry resists any measures that would force it to renounce its patents.

Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said the private sector was able to develop new vaccines and treatments to combat Covid-19 because of decades of investment in research and development.

“It would be better to have no pandemic treaty than a bad pandemic treaty, which the draft distributed to member states clearly represents,” he said.

“If adopted, the draft treaty would undermine both and leave us weaker before the next pandemic than we were in December 2019, and we urge governments to make significant revisions to the current text.”

Some non-governmental organizations called for the agreement to have more teeth. Mohga Kamal-Yanni, political co-leader of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said the current wording “contains few obligations to ensure the government takes these essential steps.”

The WHO intends to promulgate a treaty on the pandemic by May 2024.

The closer monitoring relates to efforts to prepare an “international vaccine library,” Hatchett said. Such a repository aims to “address the critical challenges of vaccine design for a given genus or family of viruses in advance,” he said. “And to show that safe and effective vaccines employing such solutions can be delivered using the rapid response platforms available to us.”

Building a library of inoculations to combat any disease that could pose dangers on a pandemic scale was a “huge task,” he added. Companies involved in the scheme would need to coordinate investments and share data when new disease outbreaks occur.

Cepi, a partnership created in 2017 between governments, charities and industry, has assumed a fundamental role since the Covid-19 pandemic. The company has created a five-year, $3.5 billion program to produce vaccines that can pass initial clinical trials within 100 days after a pathogen is genetically sequenced and identified as a potential pandemic threat. This period is much shorter than the 326 days needed for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to receive authorization from the United Kingdom in December 2020.

Cepi’s partners include BioNTech, which developed the Covid vaccine based on messenger RNA, and the University of Oxford, developer of the low-cost vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca.

Cepi is investing to expand vaccine manufacturer networks in or near areas at high risk of disease outbreaks. It is also trying to establish clinical trial systems in low- and middle-income countries to enable the rapid generation of efficacy and safety data for new vaccines.

Hiroaki Ueno, president of the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, told the Tokyo conference: “We have to prepare for the next pandemic. Agility in the face of emergencies is important.”