An international team of global health experts has recently published a report in the Lancet journal advocating for a common goods approach to address the shortcomings in the existing epidemic countermeasures which perpetuate inequities.

The report, led by Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, highlighted three main suggestions to strengthen emergency responses to future epidemics.

The International Vaccine Institute’s Director General Dr. Jerome Kim and RIGHT Foundation’s CEO Hani Kim were both contributing authors to this paper.

The first countermeasure proposed was for countries to design and implement a sustainable end-to-end ecosystem to contain outbreaks and pandemic threats at the moment and time at which they occur. Furthermore, it said that the designed system should be grounded in a common goods approach including knowledge and technology sharing, and collective ownership as a guiding principle.

In this regard, the report listed the WHO-initiated mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub based in South Africa, which partners with manufacturers in at least 15 LMICs as a prime example to model and extend to other technologies and countries.

In particular, manufacturing capacity needs to be linked to R&D capability and well-funded regional R&D hubs must link to independent clinical trial networks to prioritize research for epidemics and thus respond to local needs.

Subsequently, the report noted inclusive and networked governance with decentralized decision-making to address health needs immediately at a national and global level. Nationally, a whole-of-government approach to enable a collaborative policy environment should be adopted stated the authors. Internationally, a Global Health Threats Council was highlighted as an essential method to create a cohesive system for prompt and equitable responses to health emergencies while fostering inter-regional collaboration, and overseeing system financing.

On the note of financing, the last of the three suggestions spoke to creating a globally and regionally pre-positioned, pre-negotiated financing system whereby countries invest in their health systems for increasing self-sufficient pandemic preparedness, response, and delivery.

In this way, low-and middle-income countries’ (LMICs) dependency on charity models of aid, which perpetuate inequities and coloniality can be ended, said the authors. Additionally, the development of this system will ensure that manufacturers cannot capture monopoly rights and profits deriving from publicly funded R&D.

Rather, contracts should be designed with binding commitments favoring knowledge and technology sharing, pricing, and equitable access, it said.

Accordingly, the Pandemic Fund which was created at the G20 summit in November last year to reduce risks from epidemics and pandemics in the most vulnerable parts of the world was referenced in the report.

“We propose that the Pandemic Fund prioritize investments in manufacturing and supply chains dedicated to equity with unrestricted sharing of knowledge and intellectual property,” said the authors. “Moreover, solutions must also be agreed to leverage up to the $100 billion required for rapid response to the next pandemic.

It added that the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank can play a role in helping to fund the development of improved manufacturing capacity globally.