Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

One of the most powerful activist coalitions, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was unveiled in January 2017 at Davos. It focused on developing a vaccination for the highly dangerous MERS-CoV and on building a “rapid response platform” that would enable a quick reaction to the emergence of a hypothetical new pathogen, dubbed “Disease X.”17 Public-private partnerships like CEPI did not end the wrestling match over pricing, IP, and the transparency of contracts, but they did push more money—$706 million—into nineteen vaccine candidates.18 Ahead of time, 2020 was earmarked as the final year of the first decade-long Global Vaccine Action Plan backed by donors like the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the GSK foundation, and CEPI. A number of new vaccines, including those for malaria and HIV, were within sight of the finish line. And then in January 2020 “Disease X” actually arrived.