VENICE, ITALY, 9 July 2021 – COVID-19 will likely be a forerunner of future, catastrophic pandemics, unless significant new investments and reforms are urgently made to bolster global and national capacities for pandemic preparedness and rapid response, a panel of leading global experts warned today.
In its report, A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age, the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (the Panel) finds that the world remains very poorly equipped to prevent or contain future epidemics or pandemics. The Panel calls on the G20 and international community to move swiftly to close current shortfalls in the international COVID-19 response. However, the world cannot wait for COVID-19 to be over to make the global investments and reforms that are critically needed to head off future pandemics, which threaten to be more frequent and increasingly dangerous.
The Panel calls for a public funding increase in international financing of at least US$75 billion over the next five years, or US$15 billion per year, to plug major gaps in pandemic prevention and preparedness ― at least doubling current spending levels. The four pressing preparedness gaps identified by the Panel are infectious disease surveillance, resilience of national health systems, global capacity to supply and deliver vaccines and other medical countermeasures, and global governance. Future pandemic risks can be substantially reduced if these gaps are addressed.
The needed investments are larger than the international community has been willing to spend in the past, but negligible compared to costs of another major pandemic. The costs to government budgets alone from pandemics are up to 700 times larger than the annual additional international investments proposed by the Panel.
The additional US$15 billion per year of international financing in global public goods for prevention and preparedness includes a key proposal to establish a new US$10 billion annual Global Health Threats Fund plus US$5 billion a year to increase funding of existing international institutions, including to strengthen the World Health Organization (WHO) and create dedicated pandemic preparedness concessional financing windows in the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs).
The Panel also calls for the creation of a new Global Health Threats Board, which would bring together Finance and Health Ministers and International Organizations to provide systemic financial oversight and ensure timely and effective resourcing and coordination of international efforts to mitigate pandemic threats.
“The world is nowhere near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We must move aggressively and immediately to accelerate global access to vaccines, tests, treatments and other supplies to end this deadly crisis as soon as possible, while simultaneously scaling up efforts now to thwart the growing risk of future pandemics ― which represent a clear and present danger,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Panel Co-Chair and Director-General, World Trade Organization, and former Minister of Finance, Nigeria.
“The economic case for these additional investments in pandemic preparedness is overwhelming ― the world is paying many times more and suffering far more human and economic costs from COVID-19 because too little investment in pandemic preparedness was
made. We must do better going forward to prepare for emerging pandemic threats and reduce the damage wrought. No less than our future global and national security is at stake,” said Lawrence Summers, Panel Co-Chair and former Secretary of the Treasury, United States.
“Achieving safety from pandemics will require a basic shift in thinking about international cooperation. This is fundamentally not about aid, but collective investments in global public goods from which all nations benefit. It is the ultimate case for both national self-interest and international solidarity at the same time,“ said Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Panel Co-Chair, Senior Minister and former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Singapore.
The Panel also stressed the imperative for all nations to prioritize and sustain domestic investments in pandemic preparedness over time. Low- and middle-income countries would need to add about 1% of Gross Domestic Product to public spending on health over the next five years, complemented by increased support from multilateral and bilateral financing partners.
Specifically, the Panel lays out four areas for international action in its report:
- Secure a fundamental shift towards greater multilateral financing for global health security, including a reformed and strengthened WHO, which is heavily dependent on voluntary funding and grossly under-resourced. It is in the interests of all nations that the WHO receive both enhanced and more predictable resources to play its role effectively as the lead organization in global health.
- Make global public goods, especially for pandemic security and climate action, part of the core mandate of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), namely the World Bank, other MDBs, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The MDBs should incentivize and bolster domestic investments in pandemic security for low-income countries with grant financing. Shareholders must ensure timely capital replenishments of their contributions to the MDBs. The IFIs should also ensure countries have fast-track access to financing for response when pandemics strike.
- Establish a Global Health Threats Fund, mobilizing US$10 billion per year in additional financing to provide strong and agile support for efforts to close gaps in global preparedness. The new Fund would enable a transformed system of national, regional and global surveillance, and substantially increase the global supply of vaccines, treatments, and other medical countermeasures to radically shorten the time taken to respond to future pandemics. It would be designed to support the work of existing global and regional health organizations and to complement, not substitute for, other investments by governments and the private and philanthropic sectors in global health.
- Strengthen global governance for pandemic security through a new Global Health Threats Board. The Board will bring together health and finance ministers from an inclusive G20-Plus group of nations and regional organizations to ensure proper financing and swift actions to prevent and rapidly respond to future pandemics. The Board would determine the priorities for the new Global Health Threats Fund.
The G20 will be considering the Panel’s report and recommendations in detail in the lead up to the Joint Finance and Health Ministers meeting in October.
Download the full report “A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age” here.
For more information on the Panel and a list of members, go to https://pandemic- financing.org/
A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age: Foreword
The High Level Independent Panel was asked by the G20 in January 2021 to propose how finance can be organized, systematically and sustainably, to reduce the world’s vulnerability to future pandemics1.
Our report sets out critical and actionable solutions and investments to meet the challenge of an age of pandemics, and to avoid a repeat of the catastrophic damage that COVID-19 has brought. The Panel arrived at its recommendations after intensive deliberations and consultations with a wide range of stakeholders and experts around the globe over a period of four months. We urge that our proposals be discussed, developed further, and implemented as a matter of urgency.
Scaling up pandemic preparedness cannot wait until COVID-19 is over. The threat of future pandemics is already with us. The world faces the clear and present danger of more frequent and more lethal infectious disease outbreaks. The current pandemic was not a black swan event. Indeed, it may ultimately be seen as a dress rehearsal for the next pandemic, which could come at any time, in the next decade or even in the next year, and could be even more profoundly damaging to human security.
The world does not lack the capacity to limit pandemic risks and to respond much more effectively than it has responded to COVID-19. We have the ideas, the scientific and technological resources, the corporate and civil society capabilities, and the finances needed.
Our collective task must be to better mobilize and deploy these resources to sharply reduce the risk of future pandemics, and the human and economic damage they bring. This will require whole-of-government and whole-of society responsibilities, not only those of health authorities and medical scientists. It will mean thinking internationally, not just domestically. It must also involve bolstering multilateralism, not only bilateral initiatives.
Most fundamentally, investing collectively to prevent infectious disease outbreaks, and to ensure that large swathes of the world’s population are not left ill-equipped to respond when a pandemic strikes, is in the mutual interests of all nations, not only a humanitarian imperative in its own right.
In short, we need a global deal for our pandemic age. We must strengthen global governance and mobilize greater and sustained investments in global public goods, which have been dangerously underfunded. Both are critical to building resilience against future pandemics.
It requires establishing a global governance and financing mechanism, fitted to the scale and complexity of the challenge, besides bolstering the existing individual institutions, including the WHO as the lead organization.
The economic case for the investments we propose is compelling. They will materially reduce the risk of events whose costs to government budgets alone are 300 times as large as the total additional spending per year that we propose, and 700 times the annual additional international investments. The full damage of another major pandemic, with its toll on lives and livelihoods, will be vastly larger.
In a historically unprecedented way, security for people around the world now depends on global cooperation. Acting and investing collectively for pandemic security, together with climate change, represents the primary international challenge of our times. Failure to establish the basis for international cooperation will make it almost impossible to address these existential challenges.
In closing, the Panel wishes to record how its thinking was enriched by others. As we are comprised mainly of economic and financial experts, we benefited significantly from extensive consultations with the global health community, including the major international organizations, the medical science community, the private sector, and philanthropic and civil society organizations with deep engagements in the field. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, in particular, provided the Panel with a comprehensive assessment of requirements for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. We also drew on the insights of the top management and staff of the International Financial Institutions and leading economic and financial professionals2.
The Panel’s thinking is broadly aligned with that of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) which published its report in May 2021, and with whose members we had very informative discussions. We also gained insights from interactions with the Pandemic Preparedness Partnership, the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, and the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
The Panel’s work would not have been made possible without the expert knowledge and analysis of our Project Team, constituted by Bruegel and the Center for Global Development, and the timely and efficient coordination by the Administrative Secretariat drawn from the US National Academy of Medicine and the Wellcome Trust.
Finally, we extend our appreciation to the G20 under its Italian Presidency for leadership in convening this important review, and are committed to supporting further discussion of our proposals. We harbor hope that the grim lessons from this crisis will catalyze the collective political will and ambition needed to prevent such a deadly and costly pandemic from happening again.
1. The membership of the Panel, Project Team and Administrative Secretariat of the G20 High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response is at Annex A. The Panel’s terms of reference are at Annex B.
2. A non-exhaustive list of persons consulted is at Annex C.
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