The European Commission has signed a contribution agreement worth more than €4 million with the World Health Organisation’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin to support pandemic preparedness and faster sharing of health-threat information.
The funding, provided through the EU4Health programme, will support work on surveillance and response capacities, including efforts to share digital “pandemic intelligence” — information used to detect and track outbreaks — more effectively.
The agreement covers three areas of work.
The Commission will provide daily analyses of health threats and medical countermeasures — tools such as vaccines, medicines and diagnostics — to the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) platform, which the WHO uses to connect scientists, governments and communities and which is used in more than 125 countries and by over 30 organisations.
It also said the funding will support the WHO Collaboratory, which it described as a system to speed up analysis and modelling during health crises and which is currently supporting the response to Ebola.
Support for a pandemic decision simulator
A third part of the agreement will support a Decision-Support Pandemic Simulator designed to help leaders make decisions in a pandemic, the Commission said.
Hadja Lahbib, the European Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, pointed out that the funding would help detect emerging health threats “faster and more accurately”.
The Commission and the WHO Hub in Berlin have worked together since December 2022, and the new agreement renews that partnership.
