How COVID-19 changed Bloomberg Philanthropies' work

Bloomberg Philanthropies is known for focusing its health programs on issues related to preventable diseases and deaths, such as heart disease and drowning, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed that status quo. “I think COVID-19 changed everyone's work, including Bloomberg Philanthropies’,” Dr. Kelly Henning, who leads the organization’s public health program, told Devex. The foundation’s public health program is known for its work on the prevention of noncommunicable diseases, such as reducing the use of tobacco and promoting healthy diets, and in supporting niche issues such as road safety and drowning prevention. Domestically, it has committed funding to support programs in several states to reduce deaths from drug overdoses. But during the pandemic, it also provided funding and other assistance to organizations and governments responding to the challenges posed by COVID-19. “The COVID pandemic has alerted us that we're not doing enough on [noncommunicable diseases] and it's the time to really step it up.” --— Dr. Kelly Henning, public health program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies Some of that work continues, such as helping countries understand the burden of the pandemic through the collection of data on excess deaths. But Henning maintains that the charity’s public health focus remains on NCDs and injury prevention, which it says is just as vital as the shift to pandemic preparedness. “I think our role here is really to keep NCDs on the agenda of the preparedness discussion. We certainly defer to the experts in terms of the best techniques for early detection of pathogens and so forth. That's not an area where we work daily. But we do believe that healthy populations are part of the key to doing better in the future when epidemics and pandemics erupt, and we think that NCDs are very key to that,” she said. New funding Bloomberg Philanthropies provided funding to Johns Hopkins University to develop a free course that could help public health officials strengthen their contact tracing programs for COVID-19. It also provided initial funding to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to support research on the use of human plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients as a cure or preventative treatment. That support helped the team at Johns Hopkins obtain preliminary data, which in turn helped them secure additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to further their study. While the focus now is on COVID-19 vaccines and new antivirals, Henning said the research into plasma treatments could be helpful in the future. “When you have vaccines available and you have antiviral medicines available, it may not be a first-choice therapy. But the most important thing about that work is that it helps us know in the future, if we don't have vaccines and we don't have therapeutics, that in cases of these viral pathogens, this strategy may work,” she said. That research support builds on the long-term relationship Bloomberg Philanthropies has with the university and is part of its core funding for the institution, rather than an area the charity plans to invest in more. Henning said the group’s focus will remain on data and helping governments implement evidence-based policies such as on tobacco control and reducing high-salt diets. But that kind of investment could open up in the future. “We could do it in the future, if something occurred that made it sensible for us to step up,” she said. Pivoting programs Bloomberg Philanthropies also adopted its existing programs, such as the Partnership for Healthy Cities and Data for Health initiatives, to focus on COVID-19-related needs. Under its Data for Health program, which works with countries or states to improve the collection of public health data such as birth and death registrations, Henning said they’re now working with countries to look more closely at the burden of COVID-19. “I think countries have increasingly understood the value of death data because of COVID. It was very hard for countries, particularly early on, to know how many COVID deaths they had, and to understand sort of the description of those deaths, their location, their ages. … And so as the importance of having that data goes up, it makes our work easier, because that value is understood, and we can provide the technical assistance to work with countries on that,” she said. Under the program, Bloomberg Philanthropies works closely with health ministries and national statistics and vital registration offices to understand what’s actually happening with deaths in the country, including excess deaths that may not be directly due to COVID-19. This is significant, Henning said, as countries decide what to do with their limited resources. “Countries are trying to make decisions about rolling out vaccines and about other strategies that they can use to rein in the COVID epidemic in their country. And so they want to understand, are there excess deaths? What parts of the country might they be happening in? Or what populations might those be happening in, so that they can make sure that their resources are well targeted. So it's a very active moment for using death data to make some decisions,” she said. The program has received an increasing number of requests on improving death data collection and categorizing them. In some large countries, it also works at the city, state, or provincial level. In India, where recent excess deaths estimates published by the World Health Organization became a huge controversy, the foundation works in several states to improve death data recording. “I think the work that we do in India is more foundational,” Henning said. “It's more about how do we increase recording of out-of-hospital and out-of-health care deaths through things like verbal autopsy. So the work that we're doing there is much more … to shore up and improve their death recording, but not so much related to the specifics around the WHO estimates.” The Data for Health initiative focuses on 25 countries, but other countries can also apply for assistance through a special grants program. The Partnership for Healthy Cities, meanwhile, provided grants and information via a series of webinars to its network of 70 cities globally to discuss with mayors and their technical staff public health measures such as mask wearing for urban populations and how they can prepare for COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Through a small grants program run by the New York-based nonprofit Vital Strategies — largely used for NCDs prior to the pandemic — cities under the initiative were also able to apply for funding for COVID-19-related needs, such as purchasing medical equipment and training frontline health workers on infection prevention and control. But while that work has been important, Henning said they’re now transitioning back to their focus on NCDs and injury prevention. “There's no more important time to do that than right now. Because the COVID pandemic has alerted us that we're not doing enough on NCDs and it's the time to really step it up,” she said. In the U.S., heart disease and cancer remain the top two causes of death, according to the CDC. “We're now pivoting back to NCD and injury work, but it was important for us to be flexible and to meet the needs of the cities,” she said.