Removing Barriers to Support Early Global Pandemic Reporting
A new project, launched by the PAX sapiens Foundation (PAX), is tasked with finding solutions that remove economic and political barriers to early disease reporting, particularly for lower- and middle-income countries. The Pandemic Compensation Initiative has convened an expert working group from the private sector, academia, and civil society that will seek such solutions.
The Initiative is a multi-year project to design, advocate for, and ultimately, help implement economic mechanisms to reduce economic disincentives for rapid disease reporting.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided just a recent example of how early reporting can cause severe consequences for the reporting countries. When South Africa and Botswana reported about the emergence of the omicron variant, the countries faced severe, negative and long-lasting economic and social consequences, including travel restrictions and loss of trade.
“We have seen time and again that countries that respond swiftly and transparently to emerging epidemics can bear huge economic costs. We need a global mechanism that changes this disincentive and ensures the most responsible are not penalized, encourages rapid disease detection, and strengthens our global capacity to respond rapidly. The Pandemic Compensation Initiative is an ambitious and strategic new effort dedicated to making this kind of change in the world.” Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director, Center for Health Security, Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The Pandemic Compensation Initiative Working Group has experts from medicine, insurance, law, and civil society, with representatives from the Gates Foundation, the Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, and the World Organisation for Animal Health, among other institutions.
“We must explore creative financing mechanisms outside of traditional state-based development assistance to address the corrosive disincentives for countries to report diseases early and often. With this in hand, we engage with all, international development, the private sector, academia, and governments, to ensure effective and early reporting,” said PAX Founder and CEO, Marcel Arsenault.
The Pandemic Compensation Initiative Working Group will draw upon PAX’s 15-year, $200M global pandemic prevention programming, launched in 2021, to determine the optimal form and operating rules of a mechanism to address the consequences of early disease reporting. This work will require careful balancing of global health, law, finance, and other disciplines.
Click to learn more about the Pandemic Compensation Initiative.
