Mr. Joe Hanly:

It is lessons learned. The stand-out element of the Covid pandemic was its duration. SARS-1 was a more short-term, more localised event. Covid was practically global and a duration of two years. With preparedness for that level of response, looking at the available surge capacity in hospital systems and the development of vaccines, the latest pandemic brought the MRNA vaccine or at least MRNA-based vaccines so there was more rapid development and getting them out. Normally a vaccine would have taken ten years. With older technologies, a pandemic would be come and gone and we would still not have a vaccine out there. There have been developments in AI that short-circuit or at least shorten some of the early stage trials and can help focus on the more realistic candidate to progress from that. It goes back to the same message: "No one is safe until everyone is safe". Looking across the globe, there are health systems that are reasonably well prepared, some are very well prepared - Ireland did very well in relative terms in the latest pandemic - and there are health systems in many of the less developed countries that are not at all prepared. They are overwhelmed by business as usual in their day-to-day work and they have no surge capacity and, therefore, helping them in the interpandemic periods to build up some capability. There is a section in this on the professional healthcare workforce. Again, technology and training transfers from more developed to less developed countries. I mentioned funding mechanisms and donations earlier. It is about, broadly speaking, levelling the playing pitch in so much as we can for the less developed counties because the more developed countries will have a level preparedness anyhow.