The Independent Panel set up by the WHO just presented its report last week, on May 12th. I was happy to be given the opportunity to contribute few ideas at its expert meetings.
I have always been an advocate of the need to redress the undersupply Global Public Goods experienced by our modern global society. Nowadays all stakeholders need to be held accountable. The private sector has an important role to play.
My contributions resorted recent experiences while working at the private sector, as well as to lessons learnt while at the helm of UNIDO, between 1997 and 2005, when we developed programs with big corporations like Ericsson, BASF, Fiat, and others, as well as to more myself.
Over those years we worked hard with a view to raise awareness about the need to strengthen the supply of Global Public Goods. All too often we see the devastating consequences of falling short at that task. The global financial crisis of 2007-8 showed us how much we need International Financial Stability, as a Public Good. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic laid bare the dramatic costs of failing to provide Global Health Security to the extent needed.
No doubt, providing Global Public Goods is a collective responsibility which calls for the active participation of all stakeholders, including non-state actors, the tricky issue being, however, how to properly land this concept in a workable and actionable fashion.
We face a systemic problem. Any attempt to address it in a piecemeal fashion or by means of operational fixes could be mistaken.
For a systemic solution, meeting two key preconditions is of the essence.
First of all, institutional innovation, particularly regarding governance. For example, the financial crisis 2007-8 gave birth to the Financial Stability Board, to address problems at the roots of it. We need to define a new architecture to shape, organize and mobilize the collective will of all stakeholders – involving the private sector strategically – to strengthen existing institutions and reconfigure the provision of Global Health Security.
Second, we need to build capabilities, and do so ahead of time. Distributed skills and capabilities need to be in place sooner rather than later if we are indeed to bridge outstanding gaps in knowledge, skills, information, logistics, productive capacity and co-operative action when the time comes. And, indeed, the time has come already.
For the private sector to be engaged more strategically in pandemic preparedness and response we need to significantly endow our current governance system with a drastically more anticipatory and better actionable focus so as to enable a proper and steady state of readiness ahead of likely major disruptive events. And this needs to be done while coping with fundamental uncertainty. We need a vision and the ability to effectively translate that vision into actions.
Focus is critical. If we look for targeting multiple dimensions at once and engage in incremental gyrations or just seek funding for programs, chances are that we shall fail to get the private sector on board as a strategic partner. To actually do so demands well defined objectives, clearly articulated goals, decisive action and last, but not least, appropriate national and international incentives frameworks.
These concepts can be better explained by highlighting three focus areas for public-private partnership in the context of the pandemic: 1) innovations in scientific, technological and logistic infrastructure for virus surveillance; 2) human resources development and equipment and critical inputs production capabilities; and 3) medicines and vaccines manufacturing and distribution.
By way of illustration: the private sector could be relied upon to strengthen a WHO-centered and tightly digitally knit global network of virus-surveillance capabilities, i.e, in the form of “regional immunological observatories”, to support early detection of new virus outbreaks and to spot and monitor population disease response patterns. Incentives such as tax-breaks and other inducements may be resorted to for this purpose.
A similar scheme may be relied on permanent bases to enhance, upgrade and increase the number of human resource-intensive, dedicated health-related institutions, including universities, private training and research centers and NGOs.
WHO could work as well with partner UN Agencies, like UNIDO, to identify/monitor/certify productive capacities and facilitate access to relevant technological knowledge and capabilities, generating a roster of companies that can be swiftly retrofitted to producing health related equipment and critical inputs, including protective clothing and the like, thus attending emergencies and demands for critical life-saving tools.
Finally, although launching calls for humanitarian gestures to redistribute the existing stock of vaccines is politically important, targeted policies would be needed to address the dramatic overall shortage of vaccines, considering that currently, a considerable number of countries are still to access a single dose.
The disorderly and improvised build-up of international outsourcing networks to scale-up production is not a proper way to address critical and recurrent shortages in vaccine manufacturing capacity either. Instead, the current situation calls for the urgent development of duly certified, licensed, and regulated production networks following agreed upon guidelines.
The enormous cost of the pandemic makes the rationale for the provision of incentives to the private sector (e.g., tax-breaks, financing, regulatory measures and so on) quite plain given their huge potential impact by bringing the proposed initiatives into play.
The emerging nations count with a good deal of health-related, world-class R&D and innovation centers with a wealth of relevant knowledge, creativity and experience, as well as with multiple relevant private components of the health-care infrastructure. These resources need to be duly enlisted in all initiatives, while assisting them to strengthen, update and expand their critical capacities.
Initiatives like these can help involve the private sector more strategically in pandemic preparedness and response.
