CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was founded [August 31] in London, at the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, a medical charity. It is the joint brainchild of the Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the government of Norway, and its purpose is precisely to forearm the world against future outbreaks of disease, without foreknowledge of what those outbreaks will be. CEPI’s plan is to build up a bank of candidate vaccines for as many as possible of the viral diseases that lurk menacingly on the edges of human society, but in which there is insufficient commercial interest for pharmaceutical firms to do the development work.
