Emerging infectious diseases impact all of us. As climate change threatens to fuel the spread of these diseases, vaccines are a key defense against future epidemics and pandemics. But taking a vaccine candidate through R&D and clinical trials to licensure is expensive, often taking billions of dollars and years to complete. It’s also risky, especially for vaccines against infectious diseases with outbreak potential, where development has a high likelihood of failure and market incentives alone are often insufficient to justify the capital investment required. But as the Covid-19 pandemic showed us, the cost of disease outbreaks can dwarf vaccine R&D investments: SARS-CoV-2 triggered the largest economic crisis in over a century, costing the global economy an estimated $12.5 trillion through 2024.
CEPI's role in vaccine R&D
Aiming to address “just-in-case” R&D for vaccines against infectious diseases that can have sporadic or unpredictable outbreaks, CEPI has invested more than $2.3 billion into projects to tackle its list of priority emerging infectious diseases. CEPI also has a 100 Days Mission strategic aspiration to cut vaccine development time to 100 days for any new or re-emerging viral pandemic threat—about a third of the time it took for a Covid vaccine to be rolled out.
Return on investment
Making informed decisions about how to allocate global health resources is paramount, particularly for notoriously risky investments in vaccine R&D. To help guide CEPI’s investments and decision-making, the organization commissioned Linksbridge and partners from Imperial College London and the OxLiv Consortium to quantify health and health-economic impacts of CEPI-supported vaccines against Covid-19 and Lassa fever. We also considered three hypothetical “Disease X” scenarios, estimating the impact of achieving the 100 Days Mission for Covid- and Lassa-like viruses with pandemic potential.
A data-driven approach
Leveraging our vaccines market expertise and intelligence, Linksbridge designed Lassa fever vaccination scenarios that incorporated assumptions for variables including coverage, rollout strategy, target populations, and target geographies. For the Covid-19 impact assessment, we also provided access to historic data on vaccine deliveries for each country across all deals through 2022. This extensive database—which Linksbridge created to support the UNICEF Covid-19 Market Dashboard—pulled information from various sources, including results from Linksbridge’s COVAX Phase 1 allocation algorithm. For each vaccination scenario and both diseases, our partners then estimated how many lives and how much money could be saved under the 100 Days Mission. Linksbridge’s strategic communications team worked with epidemiological modelers and researchers at our partner organizations to create infographics and help turn the methods for and results of complicated mathematical models into compelling and informative reports.
Deaths averted, money saved
More than 8.3 million deaths could have been averted globally by the end of 2021 if a Covid-19 vaccine was available within 100 days—a benefit concentrated primarily in LMICs. Our partners estimated that saving 8.3 million lives corresponds to a monetary saving of $14.4 trillion, a value greater than the 2023 gross domestic products of Germany, Japan, and the U.K. combined. Additional investments in manufacturing and health systems further increased deaths averted to 11 million. For Lassa fever, the results similarly demonstrated the potential impact the 100 Days Mission could have: deploying a Lassa vaccine across 15 West African countries could save nearly 3,300 lives over 10 years and avert up to $128 million in societal cost. Achieving the 100 Days Mission for a hypothetical Lassa-X virus could avert 1.2 million infections, save 18,300 lives, and avert nearly $783 million in societal costs over two years.
A case for the 100 Days Mission
These vaccine impact assessments showed that investments in support of the 100 Days Mission—particularly when combined with broader investments in manufacturing and health systems—could play a key role in controlling future pandemics. While we can’t predict what a future Disease X may look like or when it could arise, we can be prepared: these findings demonstrate how crucial it is to invest in resources that enable the availability of vaccines as soon as possible after a pathogen with pandemic potential is detected.
Results from the Covid-19 and Lassa fever impact assessments were published in The Lancet Global Health and Nature Medicine, respectively.
