FasterCures would like to express our strong support for current initiatives to advance pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. We appreciate the opportunity to provide our perspective in these critical discussions.

FasterCures is a center of the Milken Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank organization that sits at the intersection of health and finance.

We submit three areas for consideration in advance of the UN High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response (Pandemic PPR). Our comments reflect insights from multi-stakeholder meetings we have convened over the past three years.

First, a globally coordinated early warning system capable of pre-event and early event surveillance must be asserted as an essential component of Pandemic PPR. Since 2020, FasterCures has brought together global experts in health, finance, data, and technology to identify the areas in which investment would be most impactful in preventing future pandemics. A key takeaway from this work is the need to coordinate and connect disparate and siloed early warning initiatives so that we can predict and detect pathogens of pandemic threat on a global scale.

Second, clear, consistent, and frequent pathways for engagement by communities and the private sector in Pandemic PPR must be established. Communities must be recognized and treated as active participants of the success of pandemic efforts, rather than passive generators of data and information. Similarly, the private sector is eager to bring to bear expertise, technologies and other resources to make pandemic prevention a reality. We must create the governance models that would make it possible for them to do so.

Finally, novel financing strategies will be needed to ensure the sustainability of an early warning system and of pandemic investments overall. Financing options should consider how to leverage and catalyze private sector investment through co-financing and blended financing mechanisms. Multi-sectoral partnerships can expand opportunities for financial and in-kind resources and provide an avenue for private organizations to contribute to an early warning system. In addition, such partnerships would foster greater coordination across funding and financing entities to optimize resource allocation and address existing gaps.

Thank you.