Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons Interviews Luc Debruyne

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Luc Debruyne, the former president for global vaccines of GSK and is a strategic adviser to the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a global collaborative platform of research scientists and international resources to respond to epidemics and, as in the case of the novel coronavirus, global pandemics. He is widely respected as one of the world’s leading authorities on building capacity in the virus response space.

Excerpts from the interview are below:

{mosads}LUC DEBRUYNE: Indeed, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was created in 2017. It was launched by Bill Gates, actually, with a coalition of the Wellcome Trust and sovereign countries that are supporting with funds, with financials, this coalition. … I call it an insurance policy for the world. It’s clear that the challenge is now accelerated, because these things come … unannounced. And then you need to show how prepared you are as a world.

LUC DEBRUYNE: It’s very clear that this is an unprecedented challenge. It comes once in 100 years time, I would say. And what does that mean? That you absolutely need all the best people. The best expertise, the best scientists, but also the political will and the financial support …  to take this challenge on. We are very glad, actually that we are working actually across the board with multinational companies like GSK, Johnson & Johnson, the big vaccines firms like Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, Takeda. They have all stepped up to the challenge to make sure that we work together to get to the prevention, because ultimately, let’s call a vaccine. If we have a vaccine, then actually that is the real exit strategy from this big crisis.

LUC DEBRUYNE on hydroxychloroquine: We need to listen to the scientists and look at evidence-based trials that can show that this therapy is working before we bring this to a global scale. The relfexes that you see of nations stockpiling are exactly what we do not want because there should be a global coordination effort to make sure that there is an allocation where it’s most needed. And that will be true as well for the vaccines, because, let’s be clear, those vaccines will not be available on day one in billions of doses. So we will have a staged approach of distributing those, allocating those, and that can only be done in a global, coordinated effort. Otherwise, nationalism is not helpful to beat something like this that doesn’t stop at the border.