Gordon Brown warns G7 that vaccination must be fair and global to defeat COVID-19

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown believes at least $30 billion is needed annually for an effective global vaccination plan.

And Brown wants this high on the agenda for next week's G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, an intergovernmental organization of leading economies comprising the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada.

Apart from needing to democratise jab access, Brown made it clear in April that he fears disparity will have repercussions down the line for both rich and developing countries yet vaccines are still being prioritised for the Western and European world.

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls for major investment in order to ensure an ongoing effective global vaccination plan.

Our World in Data reported on June 3rd that more than 26.1m British, 136m American, 16.3m German and 11.5m French citizens are fully vaccinated, yet the Africa Centres of Disease Control and Prevention confirmed on June 2nd  that only 0.51% of Africans were fully vaccinated; the continent has a population of 1.2 billion.

In a Guardian newspaper exclusive, Brown said: "Immunising the West but only a fraction of the developing world is already fuelling allegations of 'vaccine apartheid' and will leave COVID-19 spreading, mutating and threatening the lives and livelihoods of us all for years to come.

"We need to spend now to save lives, and we need to spend tomorrow to carry on vaccinating each year until the disease no longer claims lives. And this will require at least $30 billion a year, a bill no one so far seems willing to fully underwrite."

Yearly mass global vaccination support would also protect G7 nations financially in the long run, according to political risk consultancy Eurasia, which reported how G7 economies would be $500 billion better off by 2025 if such a plan took place this summer.

Despite G7 inaction, the private sector stepped up in 2020; funding from large companies, investment funds, and non-traditional investors reached record highs, while also providing healthtech companies with essential innovation support that some experts say advanced the sector ten years in just six months.

Investment monitoring platform Pitchbook reported that healthtech investment soared 47% in 2020 to a new high of $51 billion, with the sector already attracting £3.79 billion in further funding this year. 

Venture Capital (VC) biotech and pharma deal activity also notched a record $28.5 billion of capital across 1,073 deals, while IPOs by VC-backed biotech companies raised $11.5 billion in capital across 73 biotech public listings, with a record total exit value of $37.3 billion.

Paul Stannard, general partner and co-founder of the Vector Innovation Fund (VIF), said:

"Governments must continually invest in global vaccine deployment and democratising jab access, but healthtech investment overall must also be maintained or further increased for the foreseeable future.

"The current investment levels are astonishing. However, to speed development of tech advances needed to eliminate COVID-19, prevent future pandemics, and realise a more accessible, decentralised global healthcare system that benefits all, investment levels must continue."

VIF recently launched a sub-fund raising an initial $300m for pandemic protection and future healthcare, focusing on precision medicine, advanced point of care, and AI technologies that support sustainable healthcare, the global economy, and human longevity.

Five Steps to Defeat the Next Pandemic

World Nano Foundation Co-Founder Paul Sheedy recently featured in The American, discussing five key steps to defeat the next pandemic to come along.

Pathogen surveillance

Humans now live ever-closer to animals, increasing the risk of new and unknown infections crossing from species such as bats and pangolins – the suspected ‘bridges’ for the COVID-19 infection – into humans, while global travel enables the rapid spread of any outbreak. Peter Daszak, an expert virus hunter at the EcoHealth Alliance research group, suggests governments should track and intervene against emerging viruses as they would terrorists, before they wreak havoc, but it is a big task. Daszak estimates there are some 1.7 million unknown mammal viruses that could spread to humans and proposes a $1 billion programme to identify at least two-thirds of these, so resources can be tailored to track and reduce pandemic risk. Others call for consensus on the right actions for the start of an outbreak to avoid the inconsistent response to COVID’s arrival; the jury is still out on which countries made the right calls on social distancing and lockdowns.

A tougher ‘World Health Organisation’

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for a cohesive global pandemic surveillance and response partnership. The World Health Organization should be that body but has been criticised for deference to China and for being slow to declare COVID as a global emergency. The WHO’s response was that it must stay diplomatic and cannot force member states to reply to its requests. But experts argue that if the world is to get better at spotting and then acting against the next pandemic, then individual nations must not hide local outbreaks until they erupt into global issues, as happened with COVID in China and Ebola in West Africa. Instead, it needs to be a more coordinated approach under a beefed up WHO-style body – one label being used is “a biological NATO” with rapid response powers. This ‘super-WHO’ might also use combined financial muscle to: fund elimination of ‘wet markets’ where wild and live animals are sold for food; discourage jungle deforestation - which pushes animals and the viruses closer to humans - and train more local field workers in remote regions to augment the current ad hoc system where the WHO, charities, universities and volunteers combine against emerging threats, but risk being too slow.

Genetic sequencing

Virus ‘Tracking and Tracing’ has enjoyed a mixed press during the COVID-19 pandemic and many scientists think it should give way to gene sequencing, made possible by a huge increase in the number of such machines, making it possible to sequence a virus genome for as little as $50. This would allow tracking and data on the virus to be assessed quickly and acted upon while also gathering intelligence on possible mutations and their resistance to current vaccines. The UK has become a leader here and used sequencing to identify what has become known as the ‘UK variant’ of COVID-19.

Faster vaccine development

One area where governments responded well against COVID-19 is in quickly developing several effective vaccines against the virus, but experts warn that we up the pace: better preparation could have made current vaccines available even earlier, while new ones need to be evolved or developed now against COVID variants and other threats as yet unknown. Some say the goal must be investment in vaccines and drugs that protect against multiple viruses.

Ironing out distribution and logistics

In a world of Amazon deliveries and supermarket shelves groaning with produce from far-flung places, it might be thought that moving medicines should be equally simple and well-organised, but COVID-19 has shown the opposite. The sometimes chaotic acquisition and transporting of Personal Protection Equipment as well as movement and distribution of vaccines – some with sensitive shipping and storage needs – plus the ad hoc vaccination infrastructures, all show that more needs to be done in this area. Incoming US President Joe Biden moved quickly to sets up an American network of mobile community vaccination centres.

World Nano Foundation backs key steps for pandemic protection and preparedness

When the inquest opens on millions of deaths caused by COVID-19, the questions should be: “How did it catch us out?”, “what did we learn” and “what do we do in future?”

The unpalatable answer to the first question “how did it catch us out?” is: “It shouldn’t have.”

“What did we learn?” along with “what do we do in future?” according to the World Nano Foundation (WNF) the not-for-profit organisation that advances innovation and commercialisation of nanoscale technologies.

WNF Co-founder Paul Sheedy said: “With the human and economic costs of COVID still rising, all nations surely know they must invest in technology and innovation against ongoing pandemic threats, especially after ignoring previous warning signs.

“We had had successive COVID-like outbreaks like SARS and MERS, the shocking 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in Africa which killed more than 11,000 and now threatens to erupt again in Liberia, plus historic devastation from events like Spanish Flu (1918-20) which killed up to 50 million people globally, and ongoing killers like Cholera.

“Some Asia-Pacific nations, notably Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia heeded recent warnings and put early intervention measures in place that moderated COVID’s impact, but most of the rest of the world failed to prepare early enough to act using data and technology within diagnostics, tele-medicine, universal vaccines, nanomedicines and early intervention treatments.

He quoted a recent Bloomberg report suggesting that the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) received a detailed plan from pharma firm GlaxoSmithKline in 2017 suggesting vaccine technologies to pursue, plus an organisational chart for a 180-strong task force of scientists, doctors, and others to execute the scheme at a cost of $595 million over 10 years.

Sheedy added: “Amazingly, an operation like this was well within the brief envisaged by Washington when it created BARDA in 2006, effectively to develop or procure drugs and vaccines, and promote action against bioterrorism plus pandemic and infectious threats.”

The Bloomberg report highlighted how Glaxo even offered an under-utilized lab and production plant in Rockville, Maryland and experts there who might work alongside government agencies and non-profit organisations on vaccines, but nothing came of the company’s initiative.

Sheedy added: “It looks like a major lost opportunity, compounded by a US government decision to disband the dedicated pandemic response unit at the National Security Council in May 2018, at a time when nanotechnology initiatives could have made great strides to protect against the current disaster.

“It’s not as though COVID hit us like a tsunami; not only had we witnessed those earlier and similar infectious diseases, but many experts were warning in late 2019 about what to expect, and now we all do – at a cost far higher than if governments had acted on those earlier pandemics,

“The good news is the whole world knows it is now time to invest in advanced technologies to save lives and our economies in relation to the long-term effects of long COVID on healthcare and before another pandemic hits, and this kind of investment will also have a positive impact on healthcare provision generally.”

This awareness is reflected by the recent launch of the Luxembourg-based Vector Innovation Fund, with its $300m Pandemic Protection sub-fund based around better protection and preparedness from infectious diseases using technologies that enhance future global healthcare and to unlock potential growth and prosperity from innovative and disruptive technologies such as nanoscale innovations.

This sub-fund will target the long-term effects of COVID-19 on healthcare and future pandemics and ignite a new tech-driven era in global healthcare, a sector tipped to soar by 50% extra each year towards a market worth $1.333 trillion by 2027 (source: Precedence Research 2020)

Paul Sheedy also endorsed a five-point pandemic ‘insurance’ plan in the Bloomberg report: “Five steps towards victory against the next pandemic threat – whatever that may be.”

The five steps for pandemic protection:

Pathogen surveillance

Humans now live ever-closer to animals, increasing the risk of new and unknown infections crossing from species such as bats and pangolins – the suspected ‘bridges’ for the COVID-19 infection – into humans, while global travel enables the rapid spread of any outbreak.

Peter Daszak, an expert virus hunter at the EcoHealth Alliance research group, suggests governments should track and intervene against emerging viruses as they would terrorists, before they wreak havoc, but it is a big task.

Daszak estimates there are some 1.7 million unknown mammal viruses that could spread to humans and proposes a $1 billion programme to identify at least two-thirds of these, so resources can be tailored to track and reduce pandemic risk.

Others call for consensus on the right actions for the start of an outbreak to avoid the inconsistent response to COVID’s arrival; the jury is still out on which countries made the right calls on social distancing and lockdowns.

A tougher ‘World Health Organisation’

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for a cohesive global pandemic surveillance and response partnership.

The World Health Organization should be that body but has been criticised for deference to China and for being slow to declare COVID as a global emergency. The WHO’s response was that it must stay diplomatic and cannot force member states to reply to its requests.

But experts argue that if the world is to get better at spotting and then acting against the next pandemic, then individual nations must not hide local outbreaks until they erupt into global issues, as happened with COVID in China and Ebola in West Africa.

Instead, it needs to be a more co-ordinated approach under a beefed up WHO-style body – one label being used is “a biological NATO” with rapid response powers.

This ‘super-WHO’ might also use combined financial muscle to: fund elimination of ‘wet markets’ where wild and live animals are sold for food; discourage jungle deforestation - which pushes animals and the viruses closer to humans -; and train more local field workers in remote regions to augment the current ad hoc system where the WHO, charities, universities and volunteers combine against emerging threats, but risk being too slow.

Genetic sequencing

Virus ‘Tracking and Tracing’ has enjoyed a mixed press during the COVID-19 pandemic and many scientists think it should give way to gene sequencing, made possible by a huge increase in the number of such machines, making it possible to sequence a virus genome for as little at $50.

This would allow tracking and data on the virus to be assessed quickly and acted upon while also gathering intelligence on possible mutations and their resistance to current vaccines.

The UK has become a leader here and used sequencing to identify what has become known as the ‘UK variant’ of COVID-19.

Faster vaccine development

One area where governments responded well against COVID-19 is in quickly developing several effective vaccines against the virus, but experts warn that we up the pace: better preparation could have made current vaccines available even earlier, while new ones need to be evolved or developed now against COVID variants and other threats as yet unknown.

Some say the goal must be investment in vaccines and drugs that protect against multiple viruses.

Ironing out distribution and logistics

In a world of Amazon deliveries and supermarket shelves groaning with produce from far flung places, it might be thought that moving medicines should be equally simple and well-organised, but COVID-19 has shown the opposite.

The sometimes chaotic acquisition and transporting of Personal Protection Equipment as well as movement and distribution of vaccines – some with sensitive shipping and storage needs – plus the ad hoc vaccination infrastructures, all show that more needs to be done in this area.

Incoming US President Joe Biden moved quickly to sets up an American network of mobile community vaccination centres.

How Nanotechnology can help to Improve Global Public Health

With the world changing due to COVID - 19, the protection of public health has never had more importance. Here’s how Nanotechnology could be used in the future to help improve and maintain human health and wellbeing.

Vaccines

Vaccines are the most definitive solution to the Covid-19 pandemic, and nanomaterials already play a vital role in vaccine design, development, delivery, and administration.

It is believed nanotechnology can be used in the future to create vaccines which will show a significant decrease in side effects along with improved effectiveness. Without nanotechnology, the speed and effectiveness of vaccines to meet the needed demand during a pandemic will not be able to be met in the future.

Cancer Treatment

One of the most promising methods for finding a cure for cancer is through Nanotechnology. A new nanotechnology design is already providing hope for personalized vaccinations for treating cancer, and nanomotor probes are also being developed to sense cancer environments in the body and target cancer cells.

This demonstrates how nanotechnology development will be critical for the development of cancer treatment across the globe in the near future.

Heart Treatment

As recently as 2020, scientists discovered a way to use nanoparticles to destroy plaques that cause heart attacks. It has also been discovered how you can use nanotechnology in tissue engineering and regeneration, as well as in heart repair.

With the use of nanotechnology and the potential it has, the treatment of heart disease, attacks, and failure will become more and more effective.

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