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Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email. The Biden administration plans to host a virtual summit Wednesday on the global COVID-19 response, during which President Joe Biden will call on leaders from around the world to make new commitments to fight the pandemic. The summit’s goals, similar to those laid out by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other global health experts, include vaccinating at least 70 percent of the world’s population by next September; providing billions of dollars in tests, oxygen, and other supplies to low- and middle-income countries; setting up a financing system to pay for the global health response by next year; and more worldwide objectives to end the pandemic. The event will be the first in a series of planned summits intended to hold participants accountable for their commitments.The European Union will fund a new agency intended to bolster the region’s health preparedness and rapid response for future crises, the European Commission confirmed last week. The Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) will establish new, adaptable production capacities and secure supply chains to ensure critical equipment, medicines, and vaccines are available when needed. The agency will receive EUR€30 billion, or around US$35 billion, in funding from the European Union over the next six years, in addition to potential financing from individual member nations or the private sector. The overall total could reach EUR€50 billion, or US$59 billion, by 2027. HERA should be fully operational as of early next year.A single dose of typhoid conjugate vaccine is safe and 84 percent effective in protecting against the infection, according to a study conducted in Malawi. The results, part of a five-year, multi-country project to accelerate introduction of the vaccine, are the first efficacy results from Africa and will be critical as typhoid is increasing as a public health threat across the continent due to the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant strains. WHO recommended the vaccine in 2017 for children six months of age and older in typhoid endemic settings, making it the only approved typhoid shot for children and infants less than two years old.

Last week, the world waited with bated breath to see whether G20 health ministers would seize the moment at their annual summit to take bold and necessary action to end the pandemic, build the global health architecture for the future, and recommit to health priorities that have taken a back seat during the past two years.The answer was rather muddled. The G20 health ministers did agree on several key principles and high-level priorities, many of which were positive, but their health declaration stopped short of providing a clear road map to translate these ambitions into concrete actions. Advocates were particularly disappointed in the lack of immediate actions, including calls for specific financial commitments, to address the shameful inequities in rollout and ongoing acute needs for COVID-19 vaccines and other tools.While the G20 didn’t provide much specificity regarding new pledges, it did highlight the importance of research and development (R&D) in all aspects of global health, including bolstering pandemic preparedness, combatting antimicrobial resistance (AMR), achieving universal health coverage (UHC), and strengthening digital health. As discussions in other forums such as the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Global Health Security Agenda ramp up, G20 leaders have set the framework from which to build concrete reforms to the international system.Putting R&D at the core of the agenda This year’s G20 health declaration included strong language on R&D throughout. In discussing the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, pandemic preparedness initiatives, and reinvestment in key programs to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and UHC, G20 leaders put R&D front and center. One particularly encouraging sign was the explicit callout from health ministers acknowledging R&D as a central pillar of pandemic preparedness, something that was notably absent in global health security frameworks, including the International Health Regulations, prior to the start of the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the need to enshrine greater global governance and coordination of R&D into the global health security architecture. The mention by G20 health leaders acknowledges a political shift on the issue and increases the prospects that R&D coordination and governance provisions will be integrated into a potential pandemic treaty and other WHO reform discussions in the coming months. The G20 health declaration also underlined the continued commitment toward combatting AMR, including by developing new safe and effective antimicrobials and sustaining reliable supply and production of existing antimicrobials. For the past few years, the agenda for the G20 has consistently included AMR with a focus on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), which is estimated to account for one-third of all AMR-related deaths globally. Leaders recognized that sustainable and robust resources for TB R&D are needed to accelerate development of new tools and deliver on previous commitments from the G20 and the UN high-level panels on TB, AMR, and UHC.Health ministers underscored the need to strengthen the resilience of supply chains; increase and diversify global, local, and regional vaccine manufacturing capacity; and build expertise for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Acknowledging that equitable access to medical countermeasures continues to be a major challenge, global leaders recognized the need to develop more balanced systems and infrastructure that provide greater coverage and capacity in LMICs. G20 leaders also reiterated that while vaccines have been at the top of everyone’s agenda, we must ensure that all countermeasures, especially therapeutics including oxygen therapies and diagnostics, are reprioritized as key elements of global response efforts and that the pipeline for new countermeasures continues to receive investments. Given the accelerated development of new diagnostic tools and the scale of testing needed for COVID-19, it was a positive development that G20 nations acknowledged that the introduction of testing capabilities should also be leveraged for other infectious diseases including TB, malaria, and HIV. To achieve the SDGs by 2030, the systems that are being built to respond to the pandemic must also serve to strengthen health systems overall and help in the fight against other disease threats.Where do we go from here?G20 health ministers reaffirmed their commitment to global solidarity, including by working toward equitable distribution of vaccines and supporting WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the global population by the end of 2021. Despite this, no specific pledges were made to provide additional funding to the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, nor did leaders commit to increase vaccine dose sharing to address the acute needs of LMICs.The lack of specific targets or road maps for how to achieve the outlined principles and new investment pledges by G20 countries means that leaders must now work out how to operationalize these ideas in other multilateral meetings this fall. Many advocates are now pinning their hopes on the Biden administration’s call to convene heads of state at a Global COVID-19 Summit next week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and looking for tangible actions during the G20 Joint Health and Finance Ministers’ Meeting or World Health Assembly deliberations on a new pandemic treaty or framework convention.These forums will now have to pick up the baton, since we need global governance to be more inclusive, equitable, and accountable. This G20 health ministers’ declaration was a step in the right direction, as it set a framework for improving global health R&D coordination and governance, but it put the onus on other forums to follow through with concrete actions. Global leaders must now seize the moment and deliver on their promises. 

The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) applauds the US government’s efforts to host a Global COVID-19 Summit on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly next week and calls on heads of state, multilateral and regional bodies, and private-sector and non-governmental leaders to take this moment to take a fresh look at how to tackle the pandemic globally and solve the inequities that have plagued the COVID-19 response the past year and a half.GHTC is committed to the shared targets of vaccinating the world, saving lives now, and building back better. Within these priorities, we call on summit stakeholders to commit to bolstering global investments in robust surveillance and data sharing, including for genomic sequencing; increased testing and analysis to detect emerging variants; and research and development (R&D), including supporting clinical trials for “wave 2” therapeutic and vaccine candidates as well as increasing regional manufacturing capacities for all medical countermeasures. GHTC also supports the creation of a global health security financial intermediary fund that can be leveraged to mobilize resources for immediate COVID-19 response needs and bolster research, development, and manufacturing capabilities in every region as part of longer-term pandemic preparedness systems strengthening.GHTC stands ready to convene partners to assess gaps in the upstream R&D aspects of the COVID-19 response, to remove policy barriers, and to enable product developers to advance progress on delivering and deploying technologies fit for purpose for the lowest-resource settings. We are also committed to leveraging our platform to elevate perspectives of national and regional stakeholders from lower- and middle-income countries to ensure global investments in R&D and manufacturing capacity strengthening are driven in a way best suited to strengthening pandemic preparedness in each local context.Finally, we call for the establishment of a global envoy or focal point to galvanize support and align efforts when a new COVID-19 road map for ending the pandemic is developed, and to ensure accountability and global representation. The global community must come together and hold each other accountable to eliminate every bottleneck slowing down a truly global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. No one is safe until everyone is safe, and tangible collective action is the only way we will meet the targets of vaccinating the world, saving lives, and building back better.