Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
LAST week, a brief commentary posted on the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) blog offered some interesting, no-nonsense insights into the state of pandemic preparedness across Southeast Asia. The article caught our attention primarily because of who wrote it, and because of the clear, although implicit, message that the subject matter is one area in which the Philippines could be making better use of its position as chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) this year.
The article, titled “How Asia and the Pacific can get ready for the next pandemic,” was written by Scott Morris, the ADB’s vice president for East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the Philippines’ very own Dr. Eduardo “Dodo” Banzon, a former president of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. and veteran of the Department of Health and World Health Organization (WHO), who, for the past several years, has been the director of the Health Practice Team in the ADB’s Human and Social Development Office. It is unfortunate that the Philippines’ obstreperous political environment caused the country to miss the opportunity to improve the public health system that enlisting Banzon as health secretary would have provided, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The message from the two ADB officials is that even though Covid-19 is six years in the past, the wider Asia-Pacific region is still contending with the fallout from it, and is probably not ready to face the inevitable next pandemic. This might be in part due to sheer exhaustion; the Covid-19 pandemic was so difficult and disruptive that people and even governments simply do not want to entertain the thought of something similar happening again in the foreseeable future.
However, pandemics have happened with alarming regularity. The Covid-19 pandemic was notable for its scale, but it was not a historically unique event. In just the past 70 years, Southeast Asia has been affected by the Asian flu pandemic of 1957–1958; the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968–1970; the Russian flu outbreak in 1977; the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak from 2002 to 2004; the avian influenza epidemic between 2003 and 2019; the 2009 swine flu pandemic; and of course, Covid-19, which began in late 2019 and is still ongoing, despite having been largely forgotten by the public.
The next pandemic is not a matter of if, but when, and while we can take some solace that there is no obvious immediate threat, there are constant reminders that threat is never far away. In the past weeks, a handful of cases of the dreaded Ebola virus have found their way from West Africa to other countries such as France and Germany, though these were successfully treated. Here in the Philippines, just a day after the WHO announced the worldwide epidemic status of the mpox infection would probably be lifted by July 2, a case was reported in a condominium complex in Mandaluyong, causing alarm among the other residents.
“Countries across the region cannot afford to move from one emergency to the next without building stronger, more resilient systems in between,” the ADB leaders write, and to better address the next pandemic emergency, they recommend three priorities be taken to heart by governments.
First, pandemic preparedness needs to be “built in” to public health budgets. In other words, pandemic preparedness should be part of the public health structure rather than a separate plan to be dusted off and implemented if a pandemic arises.
Second — and this is where we believe the Philippines can make a lasting impact through its leadership of the Asean this year — regional coordination and cooperation need to be strengthened. “Building trust, sharing data, and improving cooperation on medical and health regulation and manufacturing can help countries respond more quickly and secure fairer access to vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tools,” Morris and Banzon explain. From a geopolitical standpoint, pandemic preparedness cooperation is, or at least should be, a noncontentious issue. Pandemics are a shared threat that cross borders quickly, particularly in this part of the world, and Asean members have a strong mutual interest in everyone in the bloc being able to respond effectively.
Finally, the ADB experts recommend that countries set up fiscal mechanisms to ensure that there will be immediate access to what they call “zero-day funding.” These are resources that can be deployed as soon as a threat emerges rather than after it has already established itself, to buy supplies, pay emergency staff, and keep services running. This is another area where greater regional cooperation may help; for example, through a shared pool of resources managed through the Asean members’ sovereign wealth or investment funds.