The Forum was held on 25th,
May 2022 by the very famous honorable, rich men and CEOs that none can doubt
on. The moderator of the panel was Stephanie
Mehta, the CEO of a company called Mansueto ventures that publishes fast company
and ink magazines. The esteemed panelists were Helen Clark who is board chair of maternal partnership for maternal at newborn
and child health for the world health organization and she's also the co-chair
of the independent panel for pandemic preparedness and responsiveness, the famous man in Africa by the name His
Excellence Paul Kagame the president
of the Republic of Rwanda, Bill gates
the world’s records breaker for holding a Billions of dollars who is co-chair of bill and Melinda gate
foundation and the writer of many books including the recent called “ how to prevent the next pandemic ”, Francis de Souza was also there on the
panel who is the president and chief
executive officer of ILLUMINA inc finally
Peter Sands who is the executive director
of the global fund to fight aids tuberculosis and malaria.
The theme of the day was “preparing for
the next pandemic “ the broad topic that was all
about the discussion of the novel human pathogen on how the public and private
sectors can work together to protect the
lives and livelihoods. Mrs. Mehta
started by mentioning the interesting example of a private and public partnership that
has been worth a 10 million dollar pledge to the global fund which is the first
private organization to announce a commitment to the Global Fund’s seventh
replenishment of the world economic forum continues to support a number of global
public-private partnerships including the pathogen surveillance initiatives. That
is quite interesting!
Stephanie Mehta commenced and
introduced the conversation by asking Mr. Bill gates the question regarding the
book that he recently wrote. In her words,” I want to start with bill gates your
new book is titled how to prevent the next Pandemic but this panel is about
preparing for the next pandemic so is the next pandemic really preventable?” she
asked.
Mr. Bill gates the author of that
book didn’t hesitate to reply he also said in his words,” well the ideal
is that when you have outbreaks that you detect them early and you contain them
before they go global you know less than two percent of the deaths are in the
first hundred days and you know the infectious disease is an exponential phenomenon
And so if you let it run you know
then it's very difficult to rein it back in the true exemplars you know the
variance Between the death rates in countries with similar GDPs is quite dramatic
you have almost you know a factor of 50 between the good performers and the
poor performers where sadly us is in that poor performer category and there are clear things that they did if those were done early around the outbreak.
Then you could prevent it from spreading to lots and lots of countries so that
certainly should be the goal is to not let
it go global and we'll explore some of those very specific things that
countries and institutions can do to help prevent the next pandemic.
The Moderator of the panel moved on to the
next Panelist his excellence Paul Kagame and asked him a critical question that
stated like, what do you see as the top lessons that we've learned about preparing
for the next pandemic from dealing with the covid-19 pandemic?
And Kagame answered it by mentioning
how the great solution to the next pandemic by emphasizing how the minds should
be made up. In his words, he said” to begin with we have to act as if there is
going to be a pandemic sooner or later anyway so we get prepared for that
either to prevent it or stop it from spreading as beer as Bill has just said but what we have learned for example from
the perspective of our continent
We have to deal with capacity issues
to begin we must have the capacity to test treat administer vaccines and so
forth which is number one. Number two the
lessons we learned also show us that we have to avoid always be dependent on
others for things that our lives depend
on so that's why we seek to build manufacturing capacities for
Vaccines like is beginning to happen
in different parts of our continent. The third would be if you look at across
the continent we have to again work together we have to put our resources in
which case continentally we have the Africans CDC and we also have the African
medicine agency and you have to build in the capacity to help all the 55 countries
of our continent. The other I should say we need reality to focus
There is a lot in science and
research and technology that we should be able to tap into to deal with all
these crises. So, we should make investments either in individual countries or
again continentally and that's what we have been doing and seeking to do. He
replied.
Again the moderator went on prompting
the question on Mrs. Helen Crack about the that she in independent panel
released in the month of May of this year 2022 which was titled “transforming or tinkering inaction lays the
groundwork for another pandemic” and, Mehta expressed how the title seemed to sober and looks bluntly. She
then asked Helen to talk a little bit about it. In her answer, she said that in
the initial report we observed that there'd been previously around 16 different
reports reviews and
Commissions on this subject most of
which had never been acted on at all which is part of the reason why we keep issuing
progress and update reports to remind people that there is a good set of
recommendations out there but I think there’s always a danger in this area that
it falls victim to that cycle of panic and neglect so we've had a panic. But the
reality is that political resolve to fight covert is waning popular support for
measures is waning people are over covered the problem is it's not done with us
but we're in danger of losing this moment for transformative change and let's
face it people are still dying in significant numbers every day people are
still developing long covert every day
Low-income countries, horribly
under-vaccinated we've got issues here and now
I think another reason is that the
package of things that has to happen is transected and there hasn't yet been an
effort to try and bring together a head of state and government level focus on
the range of things that needs to be done we said this needs a special session
at the general assembly it needs a political declaration that brings the
different threads together we're talking not just the who and health ecosystem.
We’re talking the wtos we're talking
the ifs we're talking the wide range of foundations players
In the space and so a lot of people
are doing bits and pieces but it's not looking like a coordinated push to get transformational
change and again I really do want to come back to this idea of how we get that
coordinated push.
The turn now for Peter and she asked her a little bit about the news that was made on that day. When peter was replying he said, “you know share a little bit about why it was so significant that the 10 million dollars itself are not the big number although the gates foundation did more than much that number but I also want you to talk a little bit about why it's important to address diseases like malaria, TB in the context
Of this conversation about preventing the next pandemic. We’re really thrilled that comic relief has announced this 10 million dollar donation pledge to the global fund's seventh replenishment comic relief has been a long-standing partner of the global fund so it's great to see them recommit to the next phase of the global fund's work and as you noted. The bill and Melinda gates foundation has kind of double-matched it bringing it up to 30 million. So, thank you bill for that. This is our first private-sector pledge for this replenishment campaign. Now 30 million is a great start the target is 18 billion so we have a little ways to go but it is incredibly important to have a significant private sector engagement in the way the global fund works both from a financial perspective because quite frankly development assistance for health budgets aren't going to meet the total requirements of all the needs that we face right now but also because the private sector brings a set of capabilities you know we have partnerships with tech companies with coca-cola on last-mile distribution all sorts of different partnerships. So, it's not just the money we like the money but it's what comes with the money in terms of private sector skills and expertise you asked about the link between AIDS, TB, and Malaria diseases like that and pandemic preparedness.
I think the starting point is that actually people don't really like thinking about pandemics I mean most of us want to wish COIV-19 over nobody's told the virus that but the general attitude is that it's over and what we've seen in the past is the public and Political interest in investing against pandemics wanes really quickly so if we want to sustain it we have to do it in a way that actually delivers for people And we can do that by investing smartly and the way we do that is by investing in lab networks community health workers supply chains primary health care facilities that simultaneously help countries defeat diseases like HIV, TB and Malaria and make us safer against future pathogens and that isn't that hard to do I mean actually many countries responses to covid-19 were based upon the infrastructure and capacities that had been put in place for HIV,TB and Malaria I think we just have to be a bit more intentional in investing in multi-pathogen capability in surge capacity so that we do achieve those two objectives at once.
