Four years after releasing its landmark report A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age, the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response has warned that the world remains dangerously underprepared for future pandemics.
The panel, recently reconvened by South Africa’s G20 Presidency, called for immediate and coordinated action to close financing gaps and strengthen global health security.
In its new report, Closing the Deal: Financing Our Security Against Pandemic Threats, the panel issued five recommendations to accelerate sustainable and equitable pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR). The report cautioned that global health financing is declining even as pandemic and biological threats continue to rise.
“Pandemic preparedness stands at a precipice,” said Victor J. Dzau, Panel Co-Chair and President of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. “The world has become distracted from preparing for the next pandemic, even as biological risks multiply. Our collective ability to prevent and respond to health emergencies remains dangerously insufficient.”
The report notes that while some progress has been made since 2021, including the establishment of the G20 Joint Finance and Health Task Force and the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, financing and implementation have not kept pace with growing global needs. Many high-income countries are cutting foreign aid, multilateral development banks remain underpowered, and few nations have embedded pandemic response plans in domestic budgets.
“The global system for pandemic prevention is fraying just as the risks are accelerating,” said Jane Halton, Panel Co-Chair and Chair of the CEPI Board. “If COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that preparedness cannot be treated as optional. It is a global public good and a matter of national security – an economic and biodefense imperative as well as a moral one.”
The panel highlighted the increasing intersection between technological advances and biological risks, warning that innovations in synthetic biology, gene editing, and artificial intelligence are simultaneously improving preparedness tools and lowering barriers to engineering dangerous pathogens.
According to the report, COVID-19 cost the global economy an estimated $10–15 trillion in lost output and 255 million jobs in 2020 alone. Future pandemics could cause average annual losses of more than $700 billion.
“We are spending less on the tools that keep us safe, even as the risks rise,” said Jean Kaseya, Panel Co-Chair and Director General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “Failing to invest in global and regional preparedness is not fiscal prudence, it is negligence with catastrophic consequences. The cost of inaction will always dwarf the cost of prevention.”
The report identifies five major financing gaps: weak domestic funding and limited non-ODA financing; insufficient access and regional manufacturing for medical countermeasures; lack of at-risk financing mechanisms among development banks; underfunded innovation and production for tests, treatments, and PPE; and the undercapitalization of the Pandemic Fund.
“The architecture for pandemic preparedness is full of cracks,” said Benedict Oramah, Panel Co-Chair and former Chair of Afreximbank. “We cannot rely on outdated systems and hope they hold under pressure. The next pandemic will not wait for us to fix what’s broken.”
To address these gaps, the panel recommended five key actions to be implemented before the September 2026 United Nations High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response. These include increased domestic and non-ODA investments, diversified manufacturing of medical countermeasures, development bank mechanisms for at-risk financing, coordinated financing for PPE and treatment production, and a stronger, sustainably funded Pandemic Fund.
The panel also proposed that governments allocate at least 0.1–0.2 percent of GDP annually toward pandemic preparedness and 0.5–1 percent of defense budgets toward biosecurity and biosurveillance. It reaffirmed the 2021 goal of $15 billion annually in international financing for cross-border threat mitigation.
“This report is a blueprint for rapid action,” said John-Arne Røttingen, Panel Co-Chair and CEO of the Wellcome Trust. “By mobilizing and tracking domestic and non-ODA financing, diversifying manufacturing, and strengthening the Pandemic Fund, it is possible to substantially reduce pandemics as a threat to humanity. We urge the G20, international financial institutions, and all governments to act now to implement these actions.”
The panel emphasized that decisive and sustained leadership will be required to implement these measures ahead of next year’s UN meeting, warning that global complacency could leave the world exposed to another catastrophic health crisis.
