Political tensions weaken battle against biggest diseases, warns health charity chief

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Global political tensions and healthcare inequities are undermining efforts to combat the biggest disease threats, the new head of one of the world’s biggest biomedical charities has warned.

Rising friction between western countries and China and Russia had combined with a “sense of unfairness” in poorer countries over Covid-19 pandemic resources to make it harder to broker international deals, said the Wellcome Trust’s John-Arne Røttingen.

His remarks come as the World Health Organization’s 194 member states make a final push to agree a landmark treaty on pandemic preparedness ahead of a late May deadline. In September, countries are due to gather on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to discuss how to tackle the growing danger of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”.

“We have a more difficult environment to find common solutions across countries, because of the geopolitical situation,” Røttingen told the Financial Times in Wellcome’s London headquarters. “West-east tension is increasing . . . and the pandemic has increased the divide between the [richer] north and [poorer] south.”

Big international meetings on pandemic preparedness, universal health coverage and tuberculosis last year “didn’t achieve a lot”, Røttingen said. The difficult talks on the pandemic treaty since then have highlighted how delayed access to Covid vaccines in some poorer countries had “created a sense of unfairness that now needs correction”, he added.

“We have strong voices from Africa saying that equity needs to be in the forefront on finding solutions — and that the high-income countries, when we really had a global crisis, attended first and foremost to ourselves,” said Røttingen, who is Norwegian. “So definitely the north-south divide on issues like equity and access to medicines has been increasing.”

Røttingen, a medical scientist and a former global health ambassador for the Norwegian government, became Wellcome’s chief executive in January. In 2017, he oversaw the launch of the international Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which now has a pivotal role in efforts to tackle the next pandemic threat posed by an as yet unknown “Disease X”.

Wellcome has committed to spend £16bn to support science during the decade that started in 2022-23. The foundation would continue to focus on areas of health where private companies had not delivered adequate remedies, Røttingen said. Three main focuses would be infectious diseases, health and climate, and mental health.

“We see the lack of commercial interests in antibiotics, yes, but also in antivirals, anti-parasitics, new diagnostics and vaccines,” he said. “It’s really a space where there are market failures and where foundations can play a crucial role.”

The world can expect to see more joint projects between Wellcome and the other two big global health charities, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation and the US-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Røttingen indicated.

“We can get more impact from [our] total investments if we can get stronger collaboration, more joined-up partnerships and collective prioritisation of the greatest needs,” he said.

The increased investment in mental health was a response to problems that were aggravated by the pandemic, Røttingen said. Everybody “agreed it’s an underfunded area”.

“How can we find new solutions — pharmaceutical but also behavioural and digital — in the mental health space?”

The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceuticals tycoon Henry Wellcome. Its investment portfolio was last valued officially at £36.8bn in 2022-23 but its worth has increased significantly since then as stock markets have risen.

The proportion spent outside the UK has grown from about 10 per cent to one-third over the past decade, but most funding still goes to UK universities and other research institutions.

Røttingen said allocations for international projects were likely to increase gradually but funding for the UK would “definitely stay at a very high level” as long as the country was “competitive”.