Staving off pandemics is key now

‘It is likely that we are entering an age of pandemics,’ said Prof. Peter Piot, director of the UK’s London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976 and is now special advisor to the president of the European Commission on Covid-19.

He told the audience of researchers, policymakers and industry players that while he believes the risk of zoonoses – infectious diseases that cross from animals to humans – and pandemics will increase, the past year has shown the value of investing in research and innovation. He particularly singled out the value of basic research, with vaccines being developed in record time based on mRNA technology that has been decades in the making.

‘One of the silver linings of this pandemic has been the formidable impact of research and innovation,’ he said. ‘mRNA (vaccines) didn’t fall out of the sky; they are the result of decades of basic research.’

It is with an eye on the next pandemic that the European Union is proposing to create a Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), whose responsibilities are likely to include foreseeing crises, averting them where possible and otherwise enabling Europe to respond at speed and scale, through actions such as strategic stockpiling or surge manufacturing.

The creation of HERA was announced by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union address in September 2020, during which she said: ‘For me, it is crystal clear – we need to build a stronger European Health Union.’ The new agency is conceived of as a way to support Europe’s capacity and readiness to respond to cross-border threats and emergencies, and a formal proposal will be put forward at the end of 2021.

‘What we have learned (from the coronavirus pandemic) is that research and innovation saves lives,’ said Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, addressing the conference. ‘In peacetime, we should continue to invest strategically in research and innovation.’