Know more

COVID19 has taught us a lesson as we realised that we weren’t prepared to rapidly provide effective and affordable vaccines and treatments. Between pandemics, when everything is quiet and everybody tends to forget about the threat infectious diseases represent, this is the moment where preparedness plans should be implemented. Currently, when there is an outbreak of an emerging infectious disease such as COVID19, multibillion-dollar programs are rushed in place, with limited effectiveness and impact. This situation tends to limit the attractiveness of infectious disease research and development and fosters underinvestment in infectious diseases in the private sector. To change the situation and be prepared for the next pandemic, governments need to sustainably make efforts to encourage public and private sectors to invest in research and development in the infectious diseases area. A system with incentives and rewards to do research and make pandemic countermeasures available to the public rapidly with reasonable margins, could work.

Link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/368/6495/1035.full.pdf