Global Health: HERA and WHO launch new €15 million partnership for stronger pandemic preparedness and response

Today, the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a new partnership funded with € 15 million from the EU4Health programme to boost preparedness and response relating to medical countermeasures for health emergencies.

Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides, said: “Through this partnership between our EU Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority and WHO, we will finance actions for €15 million to help strengthen global capacities to prepare, detect, prevent, and respond to cross-border health threats. The new partnership will strengthen access to and sharing of information, the scaling up of capacities and development of medical countermeasures and technologies. This is yet another concrete example of our actions under the new EU Global Health Strategy and our determination to play a leading role in the work to improve global health security and protect citizens and societies from health threats.”

Under the partnership, HERA will fund four global initiatives to support the following areas as regards medical countermeasures: (1) Epidemic and pandemic intelligence, access to and sharing of data and analytics through the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence; (2) development of new medical countermeasures for tackling antimicrobial resistance, including through GARDP, notably the development of antibiotics efficient against resistant pathogens, and ensure sustainable access to AMR treatments, while also driving research for new antimicrobials; (3) the scaling up of national capacities for COVID-19 and Emerging Pathogens detection, as well as genomic surveillance in Africa; (4) the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) to ensure the fast, coordinated, and successful global effort to develop and facilitate access to technologies to fight COVID-19.

This follows the presentation of the EU’s Global Health Strategy, the agreement between the Commission and the WHO to reinforce cooperation to tackle global health threats, and the agreement between HERA and WHO Hub.