Sec. 2. Findings

389 words·~2 min read·/bill/116/hr/6334/eh/section-2

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Congress finds the following: Due to increasing population and population density, human mobility, and ecological change, emerging infectious diseases pose a real and growing threat to global health security. While vaccines can be the most effective tools to protect against infectious disease, the absence of vaccines for a new or emerging infectious disease with epidemic potential is a major health security threat globally, posing catastrophic potential human and economic costs.

The 1918 influenza pandemic infected 500,000,000 people, or about one-third of the world’s population at the time, and killed 50,000,000 people—more than died in the First World War. The economic cost of an outbreak can be devastating. The estimated global cost today, should an outbreak of the scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic strike, is 5 percent of global gross domestic product. Even regional outbreaks can have enormous human costs and substantially disrupt the global economy and cripple regional economies.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,000 and cost $2,800,000,000 in losses in the affected countries alone. The ongoing novel coronavirus outbreak reflects the pressing need for quick and effective vaccine and countermeasure development. While the need for vaccines to address emerging epidemic threats is acute, markets to drive the necessary development of vaccines to address them—a complex and expensive undertaking—are very often critically absent. Also absent are mechanisms to ensure access to those vaccines by those who need them when they need them.

To address this global vulnerability and the deficit of political commitment, institutional capacity, and funding, in 2017, several countries and private partners launched the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI’s mission is to stimulate, finance, and coordinate development of vaccines for high-priority, epidemic-potential threats in cases where traditional markets do not exist or cannot create sufficient demand. Through funding of partnerships, CEPI seeks to bring priority vaccines candidates through the end of phase II clinical trials, as well as support vaccine platforms that can be rapidly deployed against emerging pathogens.

CEPI has funded multiple partners to develop vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus, responding to this urgent, global requirement. Support for and participation in CEPI is an important part of the United States own health security and biodefense and is in the national interest, complementing the work of many Federal agencies and providing significant value through global partnership and burden-sharing.