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Inside Out | Global coalition to protect against the next pandemic will only succeed with China on board
- Governments and non-profits are backing a worldwide plan to contain future virus threats, including by vaccinating people within 100 days of detection
- But such a plan requires global cooperation, and as long as China remains locked in a battle for zero Covid, its support remains doubtful
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It is depressingly ironic that, as protesters across major cities in China press top leaders to bring to an end the ineffectual cycle of testing and lockdowns that keeps the world’s second-largest economy in thrall to the Covid-19 pandemic, a coalition halfway across the world is laying plans to protect us from the next one.
Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), last week launched the organisation’s “moon shot mission” – to put global surveillance in place that can provide the earliest possible warning of “Disease X”, and to develop international cooperation that enables us to administer safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of first detection.
The Cepi initiative seems worlds away from the forlorn whack-a-mole tactics of China’s anti-pandemic forces, which have traumatised the economy and ruined the livelihoods of millions across the country.
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And herein lies a profound problem: Cepi’s mission – ambitious and essential as it may be – is likely to be stillborn until China joins it. While Beijing retains its far-from-finished battle for “dynamic zero Covid”, it is unlikely to welcome or join efforts to tackle pandemics-to-come.
As the original epicentre of Covid-19, and potential home to many of the “Disease X” pandemic threats of the future, it must be self-evident that the intensive global cooperation needed to protect us from future epidemics will be missing until China joins.
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The starting premise of the Cepi team, funded to the tune of US$3.5 billion so far by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and 30 governments worldwide plus the European Union, is that the price paid for the Covid-19 pandemic was so catastrophic that a repeat must be avoided.
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