The US is partnering with 100 countries to cooperate on pandemic response now

Health Policy Watch: The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated that weaknesses in the public health response in one part of the world can be a threat globally. Why did the US Administration release a Global Health Security Strategy now?

Stephanie Psaki: The goal is to build on and learn from the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. We started working on this new strategy as we emerged from the acute phase of the COVID pandemic feeling like it’s going to be enough in our rearview mirror that we can understand and learn from the lessons and have a more forward-looking approach with how we can prevent and address the next pandemic.

We tried to not just assume that the next pandemic or the next biological threat will be the same as COVID-19 because chances are it will take a different form. We wanted to develop a system and a process that works quickly and is adaptable, depending on different threats that can easily bring in the different parts of the inter-agency that have relevant expertise to inform decision-making.

The last global health security strategy was released in the previous administration in 2019. So the idea was to build on that, five years later. Very practically this is something that was called for in a national security memorandum as well as the Global Health Security Act, passed as part of the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] last year. So both Congress and the President asked us to do it.

HPW: What is remarkable about the new strategy is the expansion of global partners from 50 to over 100 countries. Partners now include countries across almost all continents. How are these countries chosen?

Psaki: There are a number of different criteria we use to select partners. You’ll see that some of them are countries where we’ve been working with for a while in global health broadly or global health security, specifically, and then some are countries where this is a new global health security partnership.

Need is top of the list in terms of where there are gaps in their global health security capacity and their ability to detect, prevent, and respond to an outbreak. There also is political will. So these are partnerships that we formed with the countries – with the government directly to just make sure that there was interest, not just in getting government support, but also investing them domestically in global health security so that we can move the goal forward together.

And then the third criterion is risk both to the United States and to the rest of the world in terms of an outbreak. So looking at countries where there’s emergence of pathogens that pose a pandemic threat or you know, otherwise have expressed concern about their own preparedness.

We also launched a website that lays out who the 50 countries are, how long we’ve been working with them, what we’re working with them on.