CEPI hopeful despite underwhelming replenishment

After meeting less than half of its funding goal in its latest replenishment, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations says it is anticipating additional funding commitments.

“I can’t speak about specific discussions at this point, but a number of additional commitments are in train and will be announced in due course,” CEPI CEO Dr. Richard Hatchett told Devex in an email.

A relative newcomer in the global health scene, CEPI’s mandate is to accelerate the development of vaccines for emerging infectious disease threats. But in 2020, it became involved in the COVID-19 response, investing in the development of a diverse portfolio of vaccines, which included the ones developed by Moderna, Novavax, and AstraZeneca.

That experience helped shape CEPI’s next five-year strategy, the headline goal of which is to shorten the time it takes to develop vaccines for new diseases to 100 days.

But CEPI was only able to raise just over $1.5 billion against its $3.5 billion ask during its replenishment last week.

It didn’t seem to come as a surprise — including to Hatchett — but he is hopeful that donors would provide more in the coming years.

“A number of partners from whom we anticipate support were not in a position to make announcements at the Summit, so we knew that the amount on the day was likely to be a partial down payment towards our goal for the next five years,” he said, without providing specifics.

“You will have seen that a number of countries that did pledge made pledges for periods less than the full five years so we hope that their investment will be extended over time,” he added.

Who pledged, and who didn’t

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome were the first ones to announce their pledges to CEPI in January, amounting to $300 million. The United Kingdom and Japan followed with pledges of £160 million ($211 million) and $300 million, respectively.

Combined with $236 million rolled over from CEPI’s work on COVID-19, CEPI had already secured over $1 billion in pledges by the time it kicked off its replenishment.

Additional pledges came from Australia, with $74 million; Austria, with $5 million; Finland, with $7 million; Germany, with $87 million; Italy, with $22 million; Indonesia, with $5 million; Mexico, with $1 million; New Zealand, with $7 million; Norway, with $111 million; Singapore, with $15 million; and the United States, with $150 million.

But several donors that previously contributed to CEPI were missing from the pledging table, including Canada and Saudi Arabia, which previously contributed $88.8 million and $150 million to CEPI, respectively.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada told Devex via email that the government is “taking a careful look at the CEPI 2.0 investment opportunity and will communicate … any decision for further funding in due course.”

Devex reached out to the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Norway but has yet to receive a response as of publication.

This has raised questions as to what impact this will have on CEPI’s work, including on whether CEPI will be able to achieve its “bold objectives of ending pandemics and its #100days mission?” asked Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée, a Ph.D. candidate in international politics at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, in an email to Devex.

Hatchett said CEPI will continue its resource mobilization efforts, and that it’s already mapping out opportunities to raise additional funds for the next few years. Given that opportunity, and anticipating further commitments, he doesn’t see CEPI’s current level of funding as constraining, but instead helpful in allowing the foundation to start on its ambitious plan.

“We feel that the funds we’ve secured and the commitments we are still anticipating will together represent a very strong start towards our five-year goal — a better start, actually, towards a much larger goal, than when CEPI was founded,” he said.

“Will we design our programs to give us maximum flexibility to adjust or recalibrate as we move through the five years? Yes, but that’s just good program management — exactly what we did in CEPI’s first three years (before COVID-19) and over the last two years during the COVID-19 response,” he added.

A challenging proposition

CEPI’s replenishment comes amid a shift in the narrative in the global health space, from the COVID-19 emergency to preparing for the next pandemic. It also comes months ahead of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s seventh replenishment conference in the fall, where the multilateral organization will be asking for $18 billion for its work from 2024 to 2026.

These present opportunities and unique challenges to CEPI’s fundraising.

Jaume Vidal, senior policy adviser for Health Action International, said that governments, the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and civil society “still believes” in CEPI and its mission — although there remain concerns from civil society over transparency on its deals, and accessibility of the vaccines it supports.

But there’s a real competition for funding.

“We have this competition of initiatives not only for funding but also [for] political space. I mean, what's going to happen with COVAX now? What’s going to happen with C-TAP? What’s going to happen with ACT-A?” he said.

CEPI also lacks many of the community and civil society voices that compose Global Fund’s constituencies and are instrumental in engaging with and raising awareness about the fund’s works and fundraising. In addition, making the case to raise funds to prepare for what’s yet to come — which is what CEPI is doing — poses difficulties, he said.

Hatchett recognizes the challenges in fundraising for research and development.

“CEPI occupies a unique place in the global health infrastructure and raising funds for the [research and development] that we invest in presents a different set of challenges than raising funds for other global health deliverables, such as the procurement of medicines or vaccines. In these cases the donor knows exactly what they are purchasing and what the outcome will be. That proposition with R&D is very different,” Hatchett said.

But some advocates think that what CEPI has been able to fundraise to date shows donors’ growing confidence in the foundation’s mission.

Apart from the $150 million the U.S. pledged for CEPI over three years, the recently passed omnibus appropriations law also included an additional $100 million for the partnership, which could now be the “new benchmark” for annual U.S. appropriations for CEPI, Jenny Blair, manager of US and global policy and advocacy at PATH, wrote in an emailed response to Devex.

“This is an initial down payment in the overall need, but I see it as a pretty big vote of confidence in CEPI's mission and their ability to deliver on it,” she said, while adding that “more is needed” and hoping that donors such as the U.S. will build on its initial pledges to CEPI, the way it did for other global health programs such as the Global Fund.

“I believe that will be the case with CEPI as it continues to show impact and I’m quite confident that we’ll continue to see additional pledges coming to CEPI in the coming weeks and months, likely in line with government budget/funding cycles, which don’t always line up nicely with pledging moments,” Blair said.