Seven members of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition participated in a side event on lessons learnt on the strength of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Second International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2023) in Kigali, Rwanda on 12 Dec 2022. The session saw researchers sharing challenges and solutions in a series of talks that ranged from how to re-think research partnerships between institutions in the global South and North to planning for pandemic preparedness that would see strengthened disease surveillance through biobanking and sequencing capacity across the continent.

In this webinar experts and members of the Therapeutics Working Group discussed the current status of COVID-19 therapeutics, availability of these expensive medicines in low-resource settings, and research needs to advise and guide health policies.

We interviewed Prof. Caesar Atuire, a member of the Coalition’s Ethics Working Group, about “Country ownership in global health”, an opinion piece by Dr Abdisalan Mohamed Noor published earlier this year in PLOS Global Public Health. Prof. Atuire shared his perspective on Dr Noor’s lessons learned and their importance for a fairer, more global response to future pandemics.

In the two and a half years since the Coalition was established, research priorities are changing, and there is a growing focus on preparedness for future outbreaks. The Steering Committee and Secretariat of the Coalition met with the chairs and coordinators of several Coalition working groups and agreed that the Coalition must extend its scope beyond COVID-19 to respond to future epidemics and pandemics while not losing its focus on national and regional leadership in research and preparedness.

The Coalition’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Working Group is conducting a follow-up survey to assess changes in global Maternal, Newborn and Child Health priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The follow-up survey has additional questions about the impact of the pandemic on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and pregnancy.

A research team, in collaboration with the World Health Organization COVID-19 Ethics & Governance Working Group, is conducting a survey to better understand how ethics review committees operated worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers aim to identify any changes that ethics review committees implemented to adapt to the pandemic, determine whether these changes were evaluated, and whether ethics review committee members believe any of these changes should become permanent, as part of their procedures and processes.

Effective medicines have been developed or repurposed to treat COVID-19, but they are too often not accessible or affordable, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The coalition is conducting a very short survey on COVID-19 medicine availability. Survey responses will provide a snapshot of access to inform a webinar on COVID-19 therapeutics that the coalition is planning to hold in the next few months. The survey is anonymous and can be filled out quickly, as it has only five multiple-choice questions. For those who wish, there is also space to make additional comments.

A joint study team from MORU and IDDO plans to examine current national treatment recommendations to investigate the level of variation and whether they are consistent with WHO guidelines for the pharmacological prevention and treatment of COVID-19.  If you can help the team by providing your country’s current national therapeutics guidelines for COVID-19, please contact us.

The coalition’s Social Science Working Group is calling for abstracts for a special issue of Frontiers in Public Health entitled ‘Exploring Innovative Models to Improve Vaccines and Therapeutics Equity During Epidemics.’ Submissions are invited from a wide range of disciplines are invited, including law, economics, political science, ethics, and those with relevant knowledge of vaccine and therapeutics R&D and manufacturing.

Four members of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition participated in a high-level session on data sharing at the Geneva Health Forum on 4 May. The lively, moderated discussion covered the need for data sharing in a pandemic, the importance and challenge of data protection laws, and potential levers for increasing rapid data sharing.