Billions required to prevent next pandemic, warns epidemic expert

Governments must invest billions of dollars to prevent the next pandemic and begin constructing a library of vaccines for every single family of viruses, says the organisation charged with preparing the world for emerging infectious diseases.

Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said it could take as little as five years to create the vaccine bank that could be adapted when a threat was detected, to ensure the world could start vaccinating within 100 days.

Vaccine makers were able to deliver Covid-19 vaccines in record time partly because they were already developing jabs for Mers, another coronavirus. But Hatchett said that unless shots were prepared for other virus families, the world might not be as lucky next time.

“The core of the 100-day mission is built on this idea of looking at prototype viruses from the different viral families and doing as much of the work . . . in advance as possible. That’s a large but finite task,” he told the Financial Times ahead of a global pandemic preparedness summit next week in London.

The event comes as western countries ease restrictions to try to live with the virus and politicians are focused on the war in Ukraine.

Hatchett warned against “pandemic fatigue”, saying an outbreak was “not like a volcano where the eruption discharges the risk”. In fact, the increasingly interconnected world had created conditions ripe for disease outbreaks, including for other coronaviruses.

“Why would we take this to be the last [coronavirus]? We know there are other coronaviruses out there in the wild,” he said. “Some could be theoretically as infectious as Sars-Cov-2 and possibly with a mortality that is closer to Sars-Cov-1, or Mers. That would be truly terrifying.”

Hatchett said governments, business and citizens should think about protecting against pathogens like the world treated computer viruses. “We don’t think about computer threats as, ‘Oh, Stuxnet, it’s gone, we have the patch and we don’t need to worry about cyber security any more’,” he said, referring to the computer worm originally aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Cepi has so far raised $300mn from Japan and about $213mn from the UK, as well as funds from Germany and Norway. The Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation kicked off its campaign with $300mn.

But it is still far short of its goal to raise $3.5bn. The donations also tend to come from budgets earmarked for health or international aid rather than those aimed at security threats. “Imagine this in response to the Ukraine crisis, if the countries that wanted to help were having to carve resources out of their development budgets,” he said.

Hatchett was first charged with preparing for a pandemic while working at the White House under President George W Bush. Cepi, launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017, is a public, private and philanthropic partnership to invest in vaccine development.

In April 2020 he co-founded the Covax vaccine programme, which Cepi jointly runs with the Gavi alliance and the World Health Organization.

Far from being “dreamy”, he said Covax was born from “clear-eyed pessimism” that rich countries would seek to corner the market, as they had done during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

“I think we were desperately trying to do something to mitigate what we knew was going to be a very bad situation, if we just let market mechanics play out,” he said. After a shaky start, Covax has now administered 1.2bn doses.

The plan to create a new vaccine in 100 days relies on transforming global surveillance to spot potential threats earlier. A new early warning system would include genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence to track outbreaks, and monitoring of viruses in animals.

“Imagine if China had done everything it had done in mid-January [2020], in mid-December. And vaccine development had started in December rather than late January. And you delivered vaccines in 100 days. If you add those things together, there’s a prospect we could have avoided the Covid pandemic,” he said.