CEPI’s Principles for Responding to Outbreaks

Balancing scientific rigor with the urgency required to meaningfully implement public health responses is an inherent challenge of conducting research in an outbreak — one that CEPI has navigated many times in recent years. To outline CEPI’s approach to outbreak responses, we have published CEPI’s Outbreak Response Principles. This document is a shared statement reflecting how we decide to engage when an outbreak begins, our evolving thinking on what we will and won't do in outbreak contexts, and how we balance the urgency of response with the scientific rigor needed to produce medical countermeasures that saves lives, and that regulators and the world will trust.

Our Outbreak Response Principles outline CEPI’s primary role in an outbreak: advancing vaccine candidates and related research. By design, CEPI's work is embedded within national, regional, and global response efforts, undertaken in close collaboration with partners across the outbreak-response ecosystem. In doing so, we are able to effectively support coordinated approaches that address urgent public health priorities.

Building the 100 Days Mission Capabilities

CEPI's role in outbreaks has evolved since it was founded in 2017. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CEPI conceived the 100 Days Mission, a goal embraced by many, to accelerate the development of safe and effective vaccines against new threats in just 100 days. The R&D investments that CEPI supported during the pandemic have helped to build the capabilities needed for rapid R&D responses to outbreak situations and bring the world a step closer to achieving the 100 Days Mission.

Since COVID-19, CEPI has played an instrumental part of global responses to many high-risk outbreaks: from Ebola Sudan and Bundibugyo to Marburg, Mpox, Rift Valley Fever. These responses have taught us that we are effective in supporting strong science while adding value as a convener, technical advisor, and advocate to help shape faster outbreak responses.

CEPI has a unique position — and responsibility — in helping coordinate and support vaccine development in response to emerging viral threats. In particular, ensuring that vaccine R&D is done safely, securely, and to the highest ethical standards. Remaining disciplined about this role in an outbreak response is what enables CEPI to rapidly advance vaccine R&D in such situations, focusing our targeted efforts and limited resources for maximum impact. 

This means being explicit about where our responsibility begins and ends: for example, while we support the generation of evidence for investigational vaccines, we do not become the Market Authorization Holder nor offer indemnity to vaccine developers, and we always defer to national authorities on how their populations are protected with support of medical countermeasures.

CEPI’s 3.0 strategy in action

Earlier this year, CEPI launched its 3.0 strategy (CEPI 3.0), which aims to strengthen vaccine development across the pathogens and viral families most likely to spark new outbreaks, advance platform technologies that can be rapidly adapted to the unknown, and weave together innovative networks for research, manufacturing and regulatory readiness so they can act as one global system when new threats emerge.

While raising the funds needed to implement CEPI 3.0, we are also now called to respond to Ebola Bundibugyo in DRC and Uganda. This outbreak is a test of our current and future strategies; it is calling on CEPI and its partners to activate the maturing capabilities needed to rapidly develop vaccine candidates, capabilities that — once honed — will eventually make the 100 Days Mission an operational reality. 

Getting it right, together

CEPI’s Outbreak Response Principles attempt to transparently outline its role in an outbreak, including the parts that can be complex, and at times, challenging: such as the fact that vaccine efficacy won't always be provable during an outbreak, that the speed of any response will have limits, and that trust has to be earned and nurtured. 

These Outbreak Response Principles are not a finished product nor should they be. They will inevitably evolve and adapt as we respond to and learn from outbreak responses. Getting this right will take continued, close collaboration with our Coalition and ecosystem partners. It is that collaboration that will ultimately enable the world to contain outbreaks before they escalate into crises.