Director of Pandemic Sciences Institute calls on leaders to invest in pandemic preparedness

The director of a new UK institute to fight future outbreaks of infectious diseases had told global leaders ‘to put your money where your mouth is’ and invest in pandemic preparedness.

Professor Sir Peter Horby is the leader of the new Pandemic Sciences Institute (PSI), which has been founded by University of Oxford experts to identify and better respond to pandemic threats.

The aims of the institute include helping the UK and the rest of the world to deliver diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines within 100 days of the start of the next pandemic. This goal was unveiled by G7 leaders last year.

Speaking to reporters, Professor Sir Peter Horby said there has been “a lot of political rhetoric around preventing another Covid-19 style pandemic” but then continued: “what we haven't yet seen is the investment to back that rhetoric up.

“There needs to be that investment.

“Currently our fundraising has mostly been from philanthropic sources, or from industry, and we're not seeing the investment that we would want from national governments – not just our own – but national governments around the world.

“I think we need to hold them to task for that if we're going to have statements that we want drugs, diagnostics, vaccines, ready in 100 days. You've got to put your money where your mouth is and make the investments to make that happen.”

The PSI has already raised around £100m for programmatic costs and construction of a new building.

The institute is set to have its own labs to investigate high-threat pathogens and look at viruses that have the potential to cause further outbreaks including Sars-CoV-2, nipah virus and the monkeypox virus.

Experts from different fields will work together to learn from the lessons of Covid and refine diagnostics, drugs, vaccines and surveillance to help counter the next pandemic threat.

Sir Peter highlighted the rapid response to Covid-19 in showing what the scientific community was capable of, saying: “We saw vaccines developed at lightning speed, we saw therapeutic trials set up in just nine days. We saw new diagnostics, and we saw new public health interventions. And all of those have made a very real difference saving lives. And if we can do that during the emergency, we should be able to achieve that during peacetime as well.”

There is a UK Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre (VMIC) near Oxford, which was meant to be part of the country's pandemic defences, however it has since been sold to the private sector. The completion date was brought forward, because of the pandemic. It was built to develop a state-run vaccine manufacturing network and speed up vaccine production in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease. However, since it has been sold, it will no longer be performing this role

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, said this was a shame.

“I’m disappointed that VMIC won't be able to fulfil the role that we had planned for it. It was planned as a flexible facility that could manufacture more than one vaccine technology and be able to respond as needed.”

She added: “We want to be in a position, as Peter said, within 100 days of knowing about a new pandemic, having the tools ready to deal with that so that we don't find ourselves in a situation where a virus has spread around the world and there's no prospect of containing it."