Preparing for the Next Pandemic discussion at the World Economic Forum
Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer at Mansueto Ventures was the moderator for the panel at the WEF ( World Economic Forum) ” Preparing for the Next Pandemic.”
The Speakers in this discussion were, Peter Sands, Bill Gates, Francis deSouza, Helen E. Clark, and Paul Kagame. Stephanie Mehta began by saying, ” One human pathogen emerges every year, and any one of those pathogens could have the potential to be the next pandemic ” The WEF continues to support a number of public-private partnerships including The pathogens surveillance initiatives.
When Metha asked Bill Gates if the next pandemic is preventable, Gates replied with a smile ” The ideal is that when you have outbreaks that you detect them early and you contain them before they go global. Infectious disease is an exponential phenomenon and less than 2% of overall deaths occur in the first 100 days.” According to Gates, if one manages the outbreak early on, one may prevent it from spreading to many countries.
” We have to have capacity issues, to test, to treat, to administer vaccines, and so on and so forth,” were the lessons we learned from this pandemic, said President of Rwanda Kagame.
Peter Sands, executive director of the Global funds to fight HIV, TB and malaria, said that he was thrilled that today Comic Relief US announced a US$10 million pledge along with the matching pledge by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation resulting in a US$30 million commitment toward ending the three diseases.
“At Illumina we provide machines were you put in blood, saliva or plant material and we will tell you the DNA in it ” said Francis deSouza CEO of Illumina. ” What happened is that over the last few years the price of sequencing has dropped from a $150,000 a Genome in 2007 to $600 a Genome today so over a 99% drop in the price” continued deSouza. ” That enabled us to deploy sequencing around the world and we started to see that pay off in a number of ways. Right in the begining of the pandemic we were in Wuhan, the first notification of the WHO was on December 31st 2019, 10 days later the viral Genome was published. Moderna took that data, so they never had the live virus on their site but they used the genomic data coming from the machines to launch their vaccine development program.” he said.
Bill Gates when referring to the available Covid vaccines said that although these vaccines saved millions of lives, they are not good at infection blocking.
Peter Sand also made reference about the letter of intent signed with Pfizer last Friday for the oral antiviral for the procurement of up to 6 million treatment courses of the new oral antiviral medicine nirmatrelvir/ritonavir, sold under the name PAXLOVID™, in 2022-2023.
” We will see more variants, we don’t know what those variants would be like. But the advantage of having more tools at everybody’s disposal we can save a lot more lives” said Sand.
” I had this conversation in the White House in March 2020, were we were sitting around and their was a realization that we could have been under a bio terrorist attack and under attack for weeks and many many people were dying and we didn’t know the source we didn’t know how to combat it. And so I think instead of creating awareness that combating a pathogen is increasingly a defense priority, so the next attack, maybe the Corona Virus or the next Antimicrobial resistance but it could be a bioterrorist weapon and so what that brings into the equation is that we are not necessarily looking for public health funding which unfortunately first it goes’ through surges and then it dies off, but we should be acessing defense budgets too.” said Francis deSouza.
Helen E. Clark said that the leaders who’ve put health and wellbeing first also tend to get the best economic responses ” If you have a society which is fearful, that is not good for the economy either. A society were people are falling sick unnecessarily because you haven’t put in place the basic public health measures, that’s not good for the economy.” said Clark.
” You can use AI for different kinds of things, you can use it to detect disease patterns that are out of the ordinary and get you a better radar screen on there. We also see applications for AI in things like TB case finding, where you’re trying to use, you’re trying to improve the yield essentially because testing is expensive, so you find the cases more effectively.” replied Sands when asked about Artificial Intelligence surveillance. ” So I think we will see a range of uses of AI from disease surveillance to improving the efficacy of diagnostic efforts,” he said.
Regarding the use of the global vaccine passport, Metha asked the panel whether Vaccine passports are valuable, in the context of pandemic preparedness, ” What it would be useful would be global standards of certification” replied Helen E. Clark. Bill Gates said that what’s the point of checking if people are vaccinated ? but the data systems did a very good job on being able to verify vaccinated status. ” The U.S did not but there are some great examples, even India did a fantastic job on that.” said Gates