28 September 2022, Washington, DC, USA — IFPMA welcomes the opportunity to share our from Covid-19 Lessons Learned, which highlights that swift pathogen surveillance and sharing, an enabling innovation ecosystem, and regulatory agility must be preserved to ensure our collective ability to fight against unknown diseases. The most important lesson of the report is that we must redouble collective efforts to achieve health equity, while ensuring health systems and delivery infrastructure are strengthened. These learnings have resulted in industry tabling the Berlin Declaration, which proposes to create a collaborative solution for more equitable rollout of vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics for future pandemics. In concrete terms, industry commits to setting aside doses specifically for poorer countries at the outset of a future pandemic. A prerequisite for the declaration to succeed is to ensure that health systems in lower-income countries are better prepared to absorb and deliver vaccines and treatments, and for high income countries to provide the necessary political and financial support.
As discussions continue on how to strengthen health emergency preparedness, we must bear in mind that any future global health architecture must acknowledge a multistakeholder structure, including industry, public agencies, multilateral organizations, financial institutions, governments, and philanthropic organizations. This is the only viable solution to managing pandemic crises in the region and beyond.