The world was woefully unprepared to prevent or rapidly respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the result of decades of failure by national and global policymakers to address pandemics as a systemic and growing threat. A glaring weakness is that the ecosystem for pandemic preparedness research and development (R&D) — the system that is meant to develop vaccines, treatments, and other tools for known and unknown health threats — is rife with market and systems failures that prevent it from operating efficiently, effectively, and equitably.
While pandemics can affect the whole world and create large, global markets for vaccines, treatments, and other technologies, those markets have repeatedly failed to respond with the foresight and urgency needed to match the scale, scope, and unpredictability of pandemic threats. The world must urgently address the persistent market and systems failures in the global health R&D ecosystem to prepare for the next pandemic threat.
This policy brief, prepared by Pandemic Action Network, covers the market and systems failures in the pandemic preparedness R&D ecosystem and lays out the unique role that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) plays in leveraging partnerships and incentives to counter the failures as one key step in building a smarter, more effective and equitable pandemic R&D ecosystem.
