Health Experts Say Nations Must Invest Now to Prepare for Next Pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Africa, the continent’s public health experts found their response hampered by a lack of basic needs — from personal protective equipment to intensive care facilities and medical oxygen supplies.

Although Africa has come through the pandemic with fewer cases and deaths than other regions, now is the time to take the lessons learned over the past two years and use them to prepare for the future, said Dr. Christian Happi, director of Nigeria’s African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases.

“The future of Africa is inextricably related to its health security,” Happi said during a webinar sponsored by the Brookings Institution. Happi and other Brookings webinar participants are authors of Brookings’ “Foresight Africa 2022” report.

“We need to prepare today as if the next one [pandemic] is tomorrow,” Happi added. “This needs to be on the front burner.”

Happi, whose lab was the first in Africa to identify the COVID-19 virus, is part of a chorus of scientists and public health experts calling for nations across the continent to invest more in public health, partly by increasing investments in training scientists and developing research facilities.

“We need to scale up our thinking and scale up our ambitions on the scale of the challenge we face,” said Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) new Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence based in Germany.

Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, has said that Africa needs to triple its number of epidemiologists to 6,000 just to meet the demand of the current population.

The appearance of COVID-19 on the continent left countries scrambling to find the equipment to protect health care workers and to treat patients. Countries were forced to compete in the global market for PPE and other supplies — items they should have had already, said Muhammad Ali Pate, former Nigerian minister of health.

“We had to import masks from abroad when COVID-19 started,” Pate said with a frustrated tone. “We grow cotton here.”

With 25% of the global disease burden but 3% of the world’s health professionals, Africa depends heavily on international donors and outside support to run its health systems, Pate noted.

“And as a consequence, that allows leaders on the continent to escape from the responsibility they have to invest in their health systems in the first place,” Pate said.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed how that system makes African nations vulnerable to health emergencies, Happi said. Nations need to spend more money on science and technology education and on research and development, he said.

The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is working with Kenya and Senegal to build the capacity for producing more medications on the continent, said Stephen Karingi, director of the ECA’s Regional Integration and Trade Division.

Africa imports 94% of its pharmaceuticals and 90% of its medical supplies from abroad. Most drug production on the continent is packaging of imported pharmaceuticals.

The pandemic has begun to change that dynamic as African drug companies strike deals with European and North American pharmaceutical makers to produce certain drugs from start to finish on the continent.

The pandemic showed that Africa’s public health researchers can perform at a global level, Happi said. Happi’s lab identified one of the eta variants of COVID-19. The beta and omicron variants were identified in South African labs.

Every time African scientists were challenged and given the resources, they rose to the occasion, Happi said.

“We need to start thinking as a people that want to take their destiny in hand and then run with it,” he added.