PRINT

Speech by Commissioner Lahbib at the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing Pandemic Preparedness and Response

25.09.2026 Press and information team of the Delegation to the African Union

In June, I was in Bunia, at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak. I met nurses, doctors, and local health workers fighting the virus on the front line. They knew what to do. The expertise was there.

But one thing struck me: in an outbreak, knowing what to do is not enough. You have to do it fast enough. A diagnostic test arriving a week late does not save lives. A vaccine developed too slowly cannot stop the virus from spreading. And if communities do not trust the people trying to help them, even the best medical tools may never reach the people who need them.

So the question is not if the next serious threat will emerge, but when. The real question is: will the systems we have built move faster than the threat when we do not have all the evidence, when political attention is divided, and when every day of delay narrows our options and does more damage.

We have spent years beefing up surveillance, research and development, our manufacturing capacity, and coordination. Now those investments need to work as one, like a well-tuned machine, and to move fast when it is needed most.

As Dr Kaseya often reminds us, Africa has the expertise, the tools, and the capacity to lead an effective response. The challenge is making sure those tools are available where they are needed, when they are needed.  And communities need to trust the people and systems delivering them.

That is why we moved quickly with our African partners, delivering humanitarian assistance and medical equipment to the region. We provided nearly €500 million, combining emergency assistance with longer-term investment in health security, preparedness, vaccines, and treatments. Eleven Humanitarian Air Bridge operations delivered critical supplies directly to the region.

But more must be done, together. Yesterday at the G20 meeting of foreign affairs ministers, we discussed how the international community can scale up its response.

My message was clear: the European Union will remain a trusted partner in tackling cross-border health threats, and our Global Health Resilience Initiative sets out how.

We want to make the global health architecture stronger. One part of that is financing. The High-Level Independent Panel has highlighted an important weakness: we still do not have a clear picture of how much the world spends on preparedness, where that money goes, and where the biggest gaps are.

Building on the Panel's recommendations, the EU is working with the OECD and WHO to improve the tracking of pandemic preparedness spending.  In the coming months, we will launch a pilot with several countries.

A second priority is access to medical countermeasures. We will continue investing in new vaccines with partners like CEPI, with over €73 million in 2026 and 2027. That includes nearly €40 million this year for Bundibugyo-specific vaccine candidates.

Our European Vaccine Hub, backed by €100 million, will also play its role in meeting the 100-days ambition. We are also stepping up work on therapeutics, through a European Therapeutic Hub and our support for the Global Therapeutics Development Coalition.

But preparedness cannot be built in New York, Brussels, Geneva, or any single capital. No country, no continent, can do this alone. Through Team Europe, the EU and its Member States have contributed 42% of the Pandemic Fund's total budget.

Now we need to turn that investment into something you can see and test on the ground: laboratories that work, trained people in place, supply chains that hold, and systems that respond fast.

The EU-funded BE READY Partnership is part of that effort. It brings together 81 partners to set common research priorities, strengthen research networks, and mobilise science fast when a new threat emerges.

We will not close the pandemic preparedness gap with good intentions. We know the policies we need. The hard part is putting them into practice before the next outbreak. The High-level Panel said it simply: preparedness is prevention and prevention is protection.

In Bunia, I said we have to move faster than the virus. We must have the science ready, the financing ready, the supplies ready, and the partnerships ready, so that when the next threat comes, we are not trying to catch up, we are already ahead of it.