The world is preparing for the next pandemic, Singapore's senior minister says

July 13, 2021: -The next global pandemic could happen at any time, and the world must prepare for it now, said Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam of Singapore.

“We don’t have the luxury of waiting for Covid to be over before starting preparing for the coming pandemic because the next pandemic can come any time,” Tharman told CNBC in Italy.

“So we’ve got to use our present effort to tackle Covid, also to build up the capacities required to head off the next pandemic,” he said.

The World Health Organization is declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic in March of the previous year. The coronavirus has infected above 186 million people and caused at least 4 million deaths around the world, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed.

On Friday, a G-20 panel of global experts released a report proposing measures to prevent outbreaks and quickly respond to any future pandemic. Tharman co-chairs the committee with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The measures including “better and more reliable funding” for the World Health Organization and tapping multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to help fund the fight against a pandemic, Tharman said.

He added that the current international system to respond to a global pandemic is “fragmented” and “under-funded.” To plug the gap, the panel proposed to set up a new global fund with a minimum of $10 billion a year, the Singapore minister said.

“What’s lacking today in the global system, you’ve got health governance under the World Health Assembly and the WHO, you don’t bring finance together with health,” said Tharman.

“And that’s why the system is under-funded. It reacted after the event after a crisis has broken out and unable to proactive head off future crises,” he added.