Public support for spending on disease prevention and preparedness is important for ensuring international cooperation, Wellcome stresses in its report.
By Ruth Douglas & Gareth Willmer, SciDev.Net
Kampala—4, December 2021: Support for government spending on disease prevention around the world remains high among the populations of traditional donor countries, despite the economic pressures created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was one of the findings of the Wellcome Global Monitor 2020, says Beth Thompson, associate director for policy at Wellcome, the UK-based health research foundation.
The Monitor, conducted as part of Gallup’s World Poll of attitudes and behaviours, was compiled via a survey of more than 119,000 people in 113 countries and territories in late 2020 and early 2021, as COVID-19 cases ramped up around the world. It looked at people’s attitudes to science, government, and the medical profession, among other things, as well as the impact of the pandemic on lives and livelihoods.
One of the questions asked in the survey was whether people felt their national government should spend on curing and preventing diseases only if they affected their own country, or if they should spend wherever those diseases occur in the world.
“If you look at the countries that typically are donor countries–countries that invest significantly in overseas aid–there we see some big differences between the two answers,” says Thompson.
“So, for example… [around] 70 or 80 percent of people think that governments should be spending the money to prevent diseases wherever they occur, and there’s significantly smaller amounts of people saying governments should spend money preventing those diseases that only affect that country.”
Most supportive of spending on disease prevention overseas were the people of Norway, at 85 per cent, and the UK and US, at 80 per cent.
“When the survey was done, countries’ economies were already struggling, so the fact that those numbers were still high in donor countries at that time I think shows a level of public support for countries in the global North particularly to galvanise around supporting others in the rest of the world,” adds Thompson.
There does, however, appear to be “a contradiction in the data” around this question, she admits.
At least 70 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with both–including notable majorities in regions including South Asia, East Asia and Latin America.
“Because we weren’t able to ask people why, we don’t really understand what’s happened,” Thompson explains. “But we could speculate that people perhaps didn’t understand that the statements were mutually exclusive.”
Public support for spending on disease prevention and preparedness is important for ensuring international cooperation, Wellcome stresses in its report.
Thompson highlights the recommendations made this year by a G20 independent panel on pandemic financing and the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, on how to finance preparedness for future disease outbreaks and on strengthening institutions like the World Health Organization.
“The recommendations are strong, they’re important… But we’ve not made enough progress… and we need individual countries to buy into the idea of them working together and to find ways to do that through funding, through governance to make sure that they take real action.
“I think at the heart of that, knowing that people… within their country support those kinds of collaborative actions and support spending money in this way is really important.
“We’ve got a big year ahead in 2022 to make some real progress.”
This article was first published by SciDev.Net. on 3, December 2021. Republication is to create mass awareness.
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