What Leaders Must Do to Prevent the Next Pandemic Crisis
How can this year’s UN High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response serve as a springboard for action (or change) into 2024 and beyond? The COVID-19 pandemic has cost more than 24 million lives, tens of trillions of dollars, and triggered the biggest setbacks in a generation to reducing global poverty, inequality, and achieving global development goals. Yet, rather than acting on the devastating lessons of the global COVID crisis and previous disease outbreaks, along with concrete, evidence-based calls for action, world leaders are inadvertently neglecting those lessons by seemingly lowering their ambitions as they focus on a confluence of other global crises — many of which have been triggered or worsened by the pandemic. Now is the time to recognize common connections between existential threats, and take action to address them head on.
At UNGA78, Pandemic Action Network, The Elders, and the Former Co-chairs and panel members of the Independent Panel and partners will convene current and former heads-of -state and government, stakeholders from current government, multilateral organizations, civil society, academia and the private sector to preview what is required from the UN High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response and lay out a 2024 action-oriented agenda to build a pandemic-resilient future for all.