‘Cycles of panic and neglect’: Head of Pandemic Prevention Institute explains its early death | Science
When public health specialist Rick Bright launched the Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation last year, he recognized that several other efforts—some old, some new—had similarly ambitious visions for how to make the world safer from pathogens. “No one can do it all,” Bright told Science in October 2021, when the institute was 7 months old. “We have to now come together to decide how we divide and conquer this ecosystem.”
But as Bloomberg revealed on 26 September, Rockefeller now has unexpectedly decided to break apart PPI, to which it had pledged $150 million over 3 years. In particular, it will fold some of PPI’s work into the foundation’s increasing efforts on climate change, which many scientists argue will increase outbreaks of novel threats by altering the movements of pathogen-carrying animals and increasing their interactions with humans. And as a result of this strategic shift, Bright is leaving Rockefeller.
Bright has had a high-profile career and, before joining Rockefeller, became embroiled in a controversy that made headlines. For 5 years, Bright headed the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which had a $1 billion budget to fund diagnostics, treatments, and prevention tools like vaccines and masks. Battles with his boss about how to best use BARDA funds and criticism of former President Donald Trump’s scientifically unfounded push to use hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment led to his resignation, a whistleblower suit, testimony at a congressional hearing, and a segment on 60 Minutes.
At PPI, Bright had hoped to make sense of the flood of information from the many disconnected groups that do surveillance for dangerous pathogens. He says he wanted to create “a new, brilliant architectural system to connect all this disparate data together and analyze it the way a hedge fund manager analyzes all sorts of different data to understand where to invest.” Before pulling the plug last week, Rockefeller had envisioned it would be providing seed money for PPI and that other supporters would soon open up their pocketbooks.
Science spoke with Bright on 29 September about PPI’s early demise, what he plans to do next, and his deeper concerns about the future of pandemic prevention. “If we start losing the momentum from what we built, then when the next major crisis is on our doorstep knocking loudly, we’re not going to be any more prepared to respond to it than we were with this last one,” Bright says.
Q: Why are you leaving?
A: I’ve been very grateful for the experience with the Rockefeller Foundation. They have done some amazing things in the pandemic. They’ve impacted testing and vaccine equity, and they took on the audacious goal of launching what we envisioned would be a Pandemic Prevention Institute. We had about 2 years of solid progress, building a team of 25 people, and we even built partnerships around the world. But we also did a lot of soul searching. We did a business analysis of what it would cost to really connect this network and sustain it. And we looked at what some people might call the competitive landscape—I call it the collaborative landscape—and asked: What are they doing? Where would we be able to fit into this ecosystem and have the greatest impact?
We also looked at what some believe to be the waning of the pandemic. What we’re seeing with many foundations is there are cycles of panic and neglect: Put a lot of money and a lot of effort into the crisis of the day, and then when people believe that something’s moving on, the funding dries up. Organizations tend to taper down and pivot, folding efforts into a broader strategy. Rockefeller Foundation has made a full-on commitment this year to focus on the climate strategy. It’s an important issue and there’s an overlay between pandemics and climate change. But for me, personally, I want to stick with a full focus, 100%, on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
Q: When you took the job, you and the foundation knew there were all these other entities doing similar work. So it can’t come as a surprise to Rockefeller leadership that you were one of many fish in the sea.
A: I don’t think it’s necessarily just the fact that there are other people doing it. I was just in Belfast for the 70th anniversary of the WHO’s [World Health Organization’s] Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System. When you take a deep look at that network of networks, where they have reference labs, regulatory labs, and national Influenza centers in over 158 countries, they share information, new tools, and knowledge, and they have that 70 years of history and trust. Compare that to a new entity that wants to enter the landscape: The amount of time and effort it would take to build that trust is hard to calculate. I’m confident we can make technologies that work and can connect the data more efficiently and in new ways. But we can’t buy that network of trust built up over those years.
Q: My guess is that it isn’t your decision to disband PPI.
A: It is not my decision.
Q: So would you have kept it going?
A: After working with thousands of companies when I was at BARDA, you do see some that come through with a great idea and they just keep pushing it and it goes. They really start working in the first year or two, making progress, but then it seems to slow, and there are diminishing returns. My mindset has always been to succeed early, and if you’re not going to hit your goals and have the big impact you thought you would, pivot your strategy early. So what I really appreciate with the Rockefeller Foundation is I felt like we went all in. We had space, we had people, we had money, we had partners, we had the reputation and name. Rockefeller gave this a really good go.
Then the smart thing to do is look at the long-term business strategy. How many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars would it take to really build this fully and sustain it? It became clear that it was going to be much more difficult than we initially anticipated. So I followed my philosophy to pivot early. I’m confident it’s the right decision. When I look at the networks that are already in place, it almost sets the wrong tone, and can be more of a distraction or a disruption, to try to tell the world that the organizations and institutes that we have are hopeless and that we need to do something completely different and build a separate institute.
Q: It sounds like you weren’t meeting the goals that you had set for attracting outside funding?
A: That is accurate. It was really difficult to raise the funds to support this institute. Maybe we started a year too late. If we’d started sooner, I think it’d be much easier to attract those matching funds, because you were still seeing this growing threat [from COVID-19]. Look at how hard it is to get Congress to make funds available for the work we still need to do for this pandemic, let alone preparing for the next one. And around the world, it’s the same.
Q: What happens to the people you brought on as staff?
A: It’s my understanding that everyone on our team is being folded into the larger health and climate strategy. I’m hoping that the work that we’ve done is not ending. The thing that’s really ending is the concept of spinning out a whole separate free-standing institute.
Q: What’s next for Rick Bright?
A: I will continue working in pandemic preparedness response. I plan to advise organizations that are working on their strategic plans, working on their budget requests, doing what they need to do to get the funding necessary to implement. My next big act, I don’t know exactly what it will be. I have a lot of opportunities—my phone is ringing off the hook and emails are filling up. But I’m going to take some time. I am disheartened seeing the tidal waves going back out to sea at this point, the funding going back out.
Q: Any interest in returning to work for the U.S. government?
A: For the right position, where I could have impact in shaping strategies and making sure we can secure the funding and resources necessary to implement those strategies, not only for the U.S., but for the world? I would entertain that.
Q: I gather you disagree with the assertion that the pandemic is over.
A: The pandemic is not over. In the United States, we have hundreds of people dying every day, we have new variants. And we’re turning off the surveillance, we’re turning off the lights in the battlefield. We’re also not tracking monkeypox, we’re not tracking this new polio outbreak, we’re not tracking Ebola. The one thing we are doing is making a splash when something new is discovered, an outbreak is identified. But we’re really not doing the hard work of characterizing that outbreak. We’re not doing the hard work of identifying whether or not our vaccines and drugs are going to work and whether we have diagnostics. There’s so much we need to do. And that’s where I want to keep my energy, my focus—and not go out with the tide.
When public health specialist Rick Bright launched the Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation last year, he recognized that several other efforts—some old, some new—had similarly ambitious visions for how to make the world safer from pathogens. “No one can do it all,” Bright told Science in October 2021, when the institute was 7 months old. “We have to now come together to decide how we divide and conquer this ecosystem.”
But as Bloomberg revealed on 26 September, Rockefeller now has unexpectedly decided to break apart PPI, to which it had pledged $150 million over 3 years. In particular, it will fold some of PPI’s work into the foundation’s increasing efforts on climate change, which many scientists argue will increase outbreaks of novel threats by altering the movements of pathogen-carrying animals and increasing their interactions with humans. And as a result of this strategic shift, Bright is leaving Rockefeller.
Bright has had a high-profile career and, before joining Rockefeller, became embroiled in a controversy that made headlines. For 5 years, Bright headed the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which had a $1 billion budget to fund diagnostics, treatments, and prevention tools like vaccines and masks. Battles with his boss about how to best use BARDA funds and criticism of former President Donald Trump’s scientifically unfounded push to use hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment led to his resignation, a whistleblower suit, testimony at a congressional hearing, and a segment on 60 Minutes.
At PPI, Bright had hoped to make sense of the flood of information from the many disconnected groups that do surveillance for dangerous pathogens. He says he wanted to create “a new, brilliant architectural system to connect all this disparate data together and analyze it the way a hedge fund manager analyzes all sorts of different data to understand where to invest.” Before pulling the plug last week, Rockefeller had envisioned it would be providing seed money for PPI and that other supporters would soon open up their pocketbooks.
Science spoke with Bright on 29 September about PPI’s early demise, what he plans to do next, and his deeper concerns about the future of pandemic prevention. “If we start losing the momentum from what we built, then when the next major crisis is on our doorstep knocking loudly, we’re not going to be any more prepared to respond to it than we were with this last one,” Bright says.
Q: Why are you leaving?
A: I’ve been very grateful for the experience with the Rockefeller Foundation. They have done some amazing things in the pandemic. They’ve impacted testing and vaccine equity, and they took on the audacious goal of launching what we envisioned would be a Pandemic Prevention Institute. We had about 2 years of solid progress, building a team of 25 people, and we even built partnerships around the world. But we also did a lot of soul searching. We did a business analysis of what it would cost to really connect this network and sustain it. And we looked at what some people might call the competitive landscape—I call it the collaborative landscape—and asked: What are they doing? Where would we be able to fit into this ecosystem and have the greatest impact?
We also looked at what some believe to be the waning of the pandemic. What we’re seeing with many foundations is there are cycles of panic and neglect: Put a lot of money and a lot of effort into the crisis of the day, and then when people believe that something’s moving on, the funding dries up. Organizations tend to taper down and pivot, folding efforts into a broader strategy. Rockefeller Foundation has made a full-on commitment this year to focus on the climate strategy. It’s an important issue and there’s an overlay between pandemics and climate change. But for me, personally, I want to stick with a full focus, 100%, on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
Q: When you took the job, you and the foundation knew there were all these other entities doing similar work. So it can’t come as a surprise to Rockefeller leadership that you were one of many fish in the sea.
A: I don’t think it’s necessarily just the fact that there are other people doing it. I was just in Belfast for the 70th anniversary of the WHO’s [World Health Organization’s] Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System. When you take a deep look at that network of networks, where they have reference labs, regulatory labs, and national Influenza centers in over 158 countries, they share information, new tools, and knowledge, and they have that 70 years of history and trust. Compare that to a new entity that wants to enter the landscape: The amount of time and effort it would take to build that trust is hard to calculate. I’m confident we can make technologies that work and can connect the data more efficiently and in new ways. But we can’t buy that network of trust built up over those years.
Q: My guess is that it isn’t your decision to disband PPI.
A: It is not my decision.
Q: So would you have kept it going?
A: After working with thousands of companies when I was at BARDA, you do see some that come through with a great idea and they just keep pushing it and it goes. They really start working in the first year or two, making progress, but then it seems to slow, and there are diminishing returns. My mindset has always been to succeed early, and if you’re not going to hit your goals and have the big impact you thought you would, pivot your strategy early. So what I really appreciate with the Rockefeller Foundation is I felt like we went all in. We had space, we had people, we had money, we had partners, we had the reputation and name. Rockefeller gave this a really good go.
Then the smart thing to do is look at the long-term business strategy. How many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars would it take to really build this fully and sustain it? It became clear that it was going to be much more difficult than we initially anticipated. So I followed my philosophy to pivot early. I’m confident it’s the right decision. When I look at the networks that are already in place, it almost sets the wrong tone, and can be more of a distraction or a disruption, to try to tell the world that the organizations and institutes that we have are hopeless and that we need to do something completely different and build a separate institute.
Q: It sounds like you weren’t meeting the goals that you had set for attracting outside funding?
A: That is accurate. It was really difficult to raise the funds to support this institute. Maybe we started a year too late. If we’d started sooner, I think it’d be much easier to attract those matching funds, because you were still seeing this growing threat [from COVID-19]. Look at how hard it is to get Congress to make funds available for the work we still need to do for this pandemic, let alone preparing for the next one. And around the world, it’s the same.
Q: What happens to the people you brought on as staff?
A: It’s my understanding that everyone on our team is being folded into the larger health and climate strategy. I’m hoping that the work that we’ve done is not ending. The thing that’s really ending is the concept of spinning out a whole separate free-standing institute.
Q: What’s next for Rick Bright?
A: I will continue working in pandemic preparedness response. I plan to advise organizations that are working on their strategic plans, working on their budget requests, doing what they need to do to get the funding necessary to implement. My next big act, I don’t know exactly what it will be. I have a lot of opportunities—my phone is ringing off the hook and emails are filling up. But I’m going to take some time. I am disheartened seeing the tidal waves going back out to sea at this point, the funding going back out.
Q: Any interest in returning to work for the U.S. government?
A: For the right position, where I could have impact in shaping strategies and making sure we can secure the funding and resources necessary to implement those strategies, not only for the U.S., but for the world? I would entertain that.
Q: I gather you disagree with the assertion that the pandemic is over.
A: The pandemic is not over. In the United States, we have hundreds of people dying every day, we have new variants. And we’re turning off the surveillance, we’re turning off the lights in the battlefield. We’re also not tracking monkeypox, we’re not tracking this new polio outbreak, we’re not tracking Ebola. The one thing we are doing is making a splash when something new is discovered, an outbreak is identified. But we’re really not doing the hard work of characterizing that outbreak. We’re not doing the hard work of identifying whether or not our vaccines and drugs are going to work and whether we have diagnostics. There’s so much we need to do. And that’s where I want to keep my energy, my focus—and not go out with the tide.
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