Advantage CPs - Georgetown 2023

Single Payer Adv CP – CK Lab
Neg
AT: Health Adv
Plank---WHO
Set standards, increase funding, and coordinate vaccine and pathogen research and deployment with the World Health Organization
Collaborate with the World Health Organization to fund local health systems across the world.
Vaccine diplomacy checks revisionist powers and reasserts US global leadership.
Andrei Iancu et. al 21. Senior Adviser and Co-Founder, Renewing American Innovation Project. Gary (Locke, Interim President of Bellevue College, Former Secretary of Commerce, and Former Governor of Washington. David J. Kappos, Partner, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Former U.S. Under Secretary for Intellectual Property. “The Shot Heard around the World.” Center for Strategic and International Studies. Published 11/17/21. Accessed 7/9/22. https://www.csis.org/analysis/shot-heard-around-world, goa)
In 2020, the United States won the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. But that historic victory could become a historical footnote if the United States loses the race to deliver its vaccines to the rest of the globe.
Vaccine diplomacy has never been more important. Every nation on earth will be watching to see who will rise to the challenge and reap the rewards of global leadership. The United States now has an opportunity to deploy its scientific and economic preeminence in the service of all humanity. The United States has the ability to shield developing nations not only from the virus, but from the designs of competing powers. Yet, to date, the United States has been slow to seize this opportunity, and international rivals—especially China—are eagerly filling the gap created by its inaction.
Vaccines have been widely available throughout the United States for many months and to vulnerable groups for almost a year. Yet elsewhere in the world, billions of people are still without access to any shots and are desperate for help. Vaccine-rich nations such as the United States have a humanitarian responsibility to help bring everyone else out of the pandemic as well; inoculating the world is a moral duty.
In addition to a humanitarian obligation to deliver vaccines around the world, the United States has sound strategic and competitive reasons to do so.
In the absence of U.S. leadership, desperate nations are turning to Beijing, which is offering inferior vaccines in exchange for foreign-policy concessions. Meanwhile, at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a group of nations is proposing that countries agree to strip vaccine makers of their patents, copyrights, and trade secrets—the intellectual property (IP) underlying the products and processes they invented, including the vaccines themselves and the technology that produces them. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has endorsed this idea, which would surrender national competitive advantages to rival nations without adding a single dose to the global vaccine arsenal.
The real barriers to vaccinating the developing world are not IP protections. Forcing vaccine makers to give up intellectual property will not lower barriers; it will only create new ones, both for today’s global vaccination project and in future pandemics. Rather, a combination of logistical, regulatory, and infrastructure challenges is slowing global vaccination efforts. Fortunately, these are problems U.S. economic resources and technological innovation can readily solve.
The present challenge provides a perfect opportunity for the United States to reassert its leadership role in international affairs and check its rivals’ cynical opportunism.
1AC proves planks it solves pandemics – we read pink
Ranu 1AC’s Dhillon 3-15, instructor at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He works on building health systems in developing countries and served as an advisor to the president of Guinea during the Ebola epidemic instructor at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He works on building health systems in developing countries and served as an advisor to the president of Guinea during the Ebola epidemic, Harvard Business Review, 3-15-17, “The World Is Completely Unprepared for a Global Pandemic”, https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-world-is-completely-unprepared-for-a-global-pandemic
We fear it is only a matter of time before we face a deadlier and more contagious pathogen, yet the threat of a deadly pandemic remains dangerously overlooked. Pandemics now occur with greater frequency, due to factors such as climate change, urbanization, and international travel. Other factors, such as a weak World Health Organization and potentially massive cuts to funding for U.S. scientific research and foreign aid, including funding for the United Nations, stand to deepen our vulnerability. We also face the specter of novel and mutated pathogens that could spread and kill faster than diseases we have seen before. With the advent of genome-editing technologies, bioterrorists could artificially engineer new plagues, a threat that Ashton Carter, the former U.S. secretary of defense, thinks could rival nuclear weapons in deadliness. The two of us have advised the president of Guinea on stopping Ebola. In addition, we have worked on ways to contain the spread of Zika and have informally advised U.S. and international organizations on the matter. Our experiences tell us that the world is unprepared for these threats. We urgently need to change this trajectory. We can start by learning four lessons from the gaps exposed by the Ebola and Zika pandemics. Faster Vaccine Development The most effective way to stop pandemics is with vaccines. However, with Ebola there was no vaccine, and only now, years later, has one proven effective. This has been the case with Zika, too. Though there has been rapid progress in developing and getting a vaccine to market, it is not fast enough, and Zika has already spread worldwide. Many other diseases do not have vaccines, and developing them takes too long when a pandemic is already under way. We need faster pipelines, such as the one that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is trying to create, to preemptively develop vaccines for diseases predicted to cause outbreaks in the near future. Poinkt-of-Care Diagnostics Even with such efforts, vaccines will not be ready for many diseases and would not even be an option for novel or artificially engineered pathogens. With no vaccine for Ebola, our next best strategy was to identify who was infected as quickly as possible and isolate them before they infected others. Because Ebola’s symptoms were identical to common illnesses like malaria, diagnosis required laboratory testing that could not be easily scaled. As a result, many patients were only tested after several days of being contagious and infecting others. Some were never tested at all, and about 40% of patients in Ebola treatment centers did not actually have Ebola. Many dangerous pathogens similarly require laboratory testing that is difficult to scale. Florida, for example, has not been able to expand testing for Zika, so pregnant women wait weeks to know if their babies might be affected. What’s needed are point-of-care diagnostics that, like pregnancy tests, can be used by frontline responders or patients themselves to detect infection right away, where they live. These tests already exist for many diseases, and the technology behind them is well-established. However, the process for their validation is slow and messy. Point-of-care diagnostics for Ebola, for example, were available but never used because of such bottlenecks. Greater Global Coordination We need stronger global coordination. The responsibility for controlling pandemics is fragmented, spread across too many players with no unifying authority. In Guinea we forged a response out of an amalgam of over 30 organizations, each of which had its own priorities. In Ebola’s aftermath, there have been calls for a mechanism for responding to pandemics similar to the advance planning and training that NATO has in place for its numerous members to respond to military threats in a quick, coordinated fashion. This is the right thinking, but we are far from seeing it happen. The errors that allowed Ebola to become a crisis replayed with Zika, and the WHO, which should anchor global action, continues to suffer from a lack of credibility. Stronger Local Health Systems International actors are essential but cannot parachute into countries and navigate local dynamics quickly enough to contain outbreaks. In Guinea it took months to establish the ground game needed to stop the pandemic, with Ebola continuing to spread in the meantime. We need to help developing countries establish health systems that can provide routine care and, when needed, coordinate with international responders to contain new outbreaks. Local health systems could be established for about half of the $3.6 billion ultimately spent on creating an Ebola response from scratch. Access to routine care is also essential for knowing when an outbreak is taking root and establishing trust. For months, Ebola spread before anyone knew it was happening, and then lingered because communities who had never had basic health care doubted the intentions of foreigners flooding into their villages. The turning point in the pandemic came when they began to trust what they were hearing about Ebola and understood what they needed to do to halt its spread: identify those exposed and safely bury the dead. With Ebola and Zika, we lacked these four things — vaccines, diagnostics, global coordination, and local health systems — which are still urgently needed. However, prevailing political headwinds in the United States, which has played a key role in combatting pandemics around the world, threaten to make things worse. The Trump administration is seeking drastic budget cuts in funding for foreign aid and scientific research. The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development may lose over one-third of their budgets, including half of the funding the U.S. usually provides to the UN. The National Institutes of Health, which has been on the vanguard of vaccines and diagnostics research, may also face cuts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been at the forefront of responding to outbreaks, remains without a director, and, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, would lose $891 million, 12% of its overall budget, provided to it for immunization programs, monitoring and responding to outbreaks, and other public health initiatives. Investing in our ability to prevent and contain pandemics through revitalized national and international institutions should be our shared goal. However, if U.S. agencies become less able to respond to pandemics, leading institutions from other nations, such as Institut Pasteur and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, the Wellcome Trust and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs have done instrumental research and response work in previous pandemics), would need to step in to fill the void. There is no border wall against disease. Pandemics are an existential threat on par with climate change and nuclear conflict. We are at a critical crossroads, where we must either take the steps needed to prepare for this threat or become even more vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before we are hit by a deadlier, more contagious pandemic. Will we be ready?
It solves pandemics
(Barney Graham, 3-26-2023, " We Have Cutting-Edge Science to Make Vaccines, but Will Everyone Benefit?," No Publication, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/opinion/barney-graham-vaccine-science.html, goa)
As a physician-scientist who has spent nearly 40 years studying viruses and immunity, I can speak to the scientific advances that made rapid Covid-19 vaccine development possible. I oversaw the work at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center that provided the basis for designing and evaluating the initial Covid-19 vaccines and antibodies. If anything about the pandemic is remembered as positive, it will be how science ‌was applied to rapidly produce medical countermeasures‌. But despite the scientific successes, I have doubts about our ability to deal with the next pandemic threat as readily as we dealt with Covid-19 — even if it is a better-known virus like influenza. Case in point, we had a monkeypox vaccine and antiviral drug before that recent outbreak, but by the time they were deployed, thousands of people were infected. We have entered a new era of ‌‌vaccine science, but can we ‌apply our extraordinary technical capabilities toward the goal of improving public health? My time as a researcher has encompassed both the long history of vaccine research and the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Some people expressed concern that the Covid-19 vaccine development process was too fast, but the story can be told as either a one-year sprint or a 40‌-year story of scientific advances. The scientific process is, after all, incremental, and new advances build on many prior discoveries. Ultimately, the process is intended to achieve a better approximation of the truth. In biology, I think of it as looking through a dark glass and peeling back layer after layer, gradually revealing the underlying reality. In that sense, science is a faith exercise because it is searching for evidence of things unseen. Scientists imagine what could be true and then invent approaches to show whether what we envisioned is right. Over the past 15 years, technologies have emerged that have taken us through several more of these layers of understanding in biology, vaccines and immunity. The precision with which we can see structures of proteins — the building blocks that allow cells and viruses to function — and measure immune responses is stunning. The time from when the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences were available to when the first vaccines were authorized and injected into humans was about 11 months. Typically, vaccine development is measured in decades. ‌‌Forty years of research ‌‌into how to make an H.I.V. vaccine ‌‌helped make rapid Covid-19 vaccine development feasible. These tools and others led to breakthroughs ‌that directly informed Covid-19 vaccine development in 2020. Editors’ Picks Meatballs in Tomato Sauce Get a Little Lighter Malta, Land of Knights, Sailors and Rainbow Flags Pride at Work Is Priceless, but It’s Nice to Be Paid ‌Still, I am concerned that our social order and national and global governance systems are not keeping pace. Having next-generation vaccine technology without adequate systems for implementation and distribution to all people is a waste. We can be much more prepared to predict or avoid future pandemics, but we must be more intentional. This includes building better systems for local and global pandemic response coordination and making long-term investment in basic research to generate the information ‌needed to develop ‌‌vaccines, antivirals and diagnostics. There should be a much more comprehensive global surveillance program in areas with high biodiversity to identify emerging threats earlier. And ‌‌leaders of high-income countries ‌‌must understand that it’s in their best interest to facilitate and build the capacity for vaccine research and manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries. There is an opportunity, with the advent of mRNA, to establish the capability for local ‌‌scientists to find solutions for regional diseases before they become global threats‌‌. This would also provide much-needed surge capacity during public health emergencies of international concern. The global community needs to build the capacity to immunize everyone around the world in six months during a pandemic. Failure to do so in the Covid pandemic is part of the reason we suffered through successive waves of new variants. This will require cooperative effort on the part of governments, philanthropists, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations and privately held companies. I retired from the federal government in 2021 after more than two decades of service. While my career has been focused on the biology of viruses and immunity, the pandemic revealed disabling problems related to vaccine access and trust. Therefore, I decided to join the faculty at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta to be a senior adviser for global health equity. I chose Morehouse School of Medicine, one of the United States’ historically Black medical colleges, because health equity is an integral part of its mission. It’s well positioned to influence vaccine access through advocacy, policy reform and the creation of a new generation of global health experts. It’s also an ideal place to work on building trust in science by involving more diverse investigators in discovery and achieving a deeper public understanding of biology. We just lived through the deadliest pandemic in a century. It’s prudent to consider what has happened, learn from it and ‌‌decide how the world — and our part in it — should operate. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars were lost. Health and wealth disparities widened. Biology became politicized. We are left with ‌the burdens of long Covid and a mental health crisis. I was inspired by the effort and sacrifices made by health care providers and essential workers to keep us going, and I am hopeful because amid the despair and uncertainty I saw many acts of caring and generosity. In 1896, William Osler, a founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, wrote, “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” We now have tecnologies that give us a chance to better prepare, manage‌ and possibly avoid future pandemic threats. In today’s world, infectious diseases can spread around the globe in a matter of hours. A problem anywhere is a potential problem everywhere, and it is in everyone’s best interest ‌to recognize and solve regional problems ‌‌before they become global ones. It will take all of us, using all the talent and resources we have, working together to avert the tragedy of other pandemics.
Plank---WHO AI
Collaborate with the World Health Organization to fund research and development into Artificial Intelligence with the intention of surveilling and preventing diseases
AI within the Health Industry Solves Next Gen Pandemics
C. Raina, 22, "Preventing the next pandemic: Use of artificial intelligence for epidemic monitoring and alerts", PubMed Central (PMC), 12-20-2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9798013/, Wooster FG
True epidemic diseases are characterized by exponential growth. This means cases rise very rapidly over short periods of time, usually days or weeks.1 It is this exponential growth that causes health system surges and compromises critical infrastructure. An endemic disease does not have these features, and changes, if any, occur over longer periods of time, usually years. Pandemic planning has historically been based on influenza, with the assumption that the most likely pandemic will be one emerging from a zoonotic influenza virus to affect humans.1 The majority of investment in pandemic planning is around diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. While essential, these typically are available late in the genesis of pandemics and after infections have spread widely. The economic cost of COVID-19 illustrates the devastation that pandemics can cause and the benefit of both early detection and prevention. The cost of the COVID-19 pandemic was estimated in 2020 alone to be more than $16 trillion, and it is estimated to have more than doubled since then.2
Vast, open-source data can provide intelligence and early warning for pandemics and epidemics at a time when they have not yet spread beyond national borders. Signals that 

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