With a five-year billion plan, the international initiative Cepi wants to try to reduce the development time for new vaccines to 100 days. That was a third of the time it took for the first Covid 19 vaccines, the organization said in Oslo on Wednesday. This would require 3.5 billion dollars (just under 3 billion euros). Cepi appealed to governments, health organizations and other partners to support the plan.
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Cepi – the “Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations” – was started in 2017 by Norway and India with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum in Davos. The organization has been supporting the development and worldwide distribution of Covid vaccines since last year.
In Cepi's view, the five-year plan that has now been proposed could “reduce or even eliminate” future risks from pandemics. This could avert millions of deaths and trillion losses in the economy, it said. That is a project similar to the moon landing.
The enormous acceleration in vaccine development is to be achieved by optimizing the possibilities of faster carrier platforms such as mRNA. New networks for clinical tests should help. Close cooperation with supervisory authorities is intended to standardize approval requirements. Production capacities are also to be networked so that the vaccines can be manufactured quickly.
The EU Commission has presented a similar plan at European level, the Hera Incubator, but without the 100-day target.
