Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The SARS-COV-2/COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented public health challenge, spurring a global race to develop and distribute viable vaccines. By mid-2021, there will likely be multiple licensed vaccines. Although there is an urgent need for these vaccines to be made available, several critical features of any COVID-19 vaccine must be considered to ensure optimal delivery and impact.
Around the world, procurement processes—which are vital to ensuring an affordable, reliable, and high-quality supply of health products—remain fraught with obstacles.
We collected publicly available information, interviewed experts, and used our diverse range of expertise to analyse and model the COVID-19 vaccine portfolio in order to generate predictions about the vaccine portfolio's timeline.
The global public health response to COVID-19 is pivoting from high-income European countries to MICs predominantly in Asia and South America. Effective test, trace, and isolate systems may be particularly valuable in MICs, where social and economic circumstances do not support large and long-term lockdowns. But investing in such systems in MICs comes with a number of limitations and opportunity costs.
The sizeable economic and health consequences of COVID-19 are clear as the pandemic spreads, translating into additional burden on health systems not just now but for years to come.
Diagnostic testing is at the center of the policy debate around COVID-19 interventions in India. As of June 1, 2020, India had conducted approximately 3.8 million tests since it began testing in February, but many experts have noted that testing capacity is still drastically insufficient for the needs of the population.
The global effort to control the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an exceptional allocation of public and philanthropic funds to advance the development of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines as quickly as possible. While critical, even these significant commitments represent only a “down payment” on a price tag that could eventually exceed $50 billion just to scale the production of vaccines to control this global pandemic—amounts that cannot be raised through traditional donor and philanthropic commitments.
While there has been much interest and investment in developing epidemic vaccines and medicines to combat emerging infectious disease threats, there has been less attention to how we will manage and allocate the global supply of efficacious vaccines and treatments once we have them. The launch of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator marks an unprecedented commitment to global collaboration to ensure rapid and equitable access to medical countermeasures for COVID-19, such as vaccines and treatments.
As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates, global leaders are quickly realizing that we need a bigger, better toolbox to effectively fight the novel coronavirus.
As the UK undertakes “the biggest review of Britain's place in the world since the end of the Cold War,” our experts explore how global health could be incorporated into the integrated review.
Over the past two decades, global health innovation has delivered important new tools for use in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and saved many lives. Nonetheless, the current innovation ecosystem suffers from significant limitations that are likely to worsen with aid transition.
The market-driven, value-based advance commitment (MVAC) builds on the advance market commitment (AMC) mechanism previously used in global health with several important innovations and improvements. Most crucially, the MVAC is driven by MIC demand rather than donor contributions; is informed by countries’ ability to pay rather than a single, “cost-plus” price; and allows pharmaceutical companies to reap higher revenues from a more effective product. In this report, we apply our new model—the MVAC—to a target product profile (TPP), published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 and endorsed by BMGF, for a pan-TB regimen.
Global health interventions, like many public policies, are rife with uncertainty. Will a program, such as a malaria prevention strategy that looks strong on paper, work as intended? Will a new technology, such as a specific drug or device that appears effective in clinical trial settings, work in practice and provide good value-for-money?
As Health Secretary Matt Hancock returns to his role as part of Boris Johnson’s premiership, he has an opportunity to make good on the UK’s renewed confidence and ambition by drawing on what the new prime minister calls the “best healthcare [system]” to drive improvements in health globally.
There have been impressive gains in global health over the past 20 years, with millions of lives saved through expanded access to essential medicines and other health products. But behind these successes is an unacceptable reality: in many low- and middle-income countries, lifesaving health products are either unavailable or beyond the reach of the people who need them most.
In many low- and middle-income countries, lifesaving health products are either unavailable or beyond the reach of the people who need them most.
Hailed as one of the largest publicly funded health insurance programs in the world, India’s “Modicare” has, since its launch a little more than six months ago, made universal healthcare coverage an election theme for the first time in the country’s history.
As low- and middle-income countries shift away from donor support, their challenge will be finding a way to aggregate demand in order to achieve the benefits that the pooled purchasing arrangements of vertical health programs now provide. As a first step in tackling this challenge, much can be learned from a diverse group of pooled procurement initiatives that have developed over the past 40 years in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. This note reviews the rationale and functions of these initiatives, notes their potential benefits and barriers, and draws lessons regarding how best to incorporate pooled pharmaceutical purchasing models into the design and implementation of health financing reforms in countries in transition.
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