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} billion for its COVID 9 That's understandable-- required to develop a vaccine with only a small pool of potential buyers, especially if you have to set the price so low that you're unlikely to ever make money? Simply relying on market forces won't do the trick. The world needs a plan for getting vaccine factories ready in advance and financing new vaccines. This plan should include money to prepare for vaccine trials and approvals, as the U.S. government did with $20 billion during COVID. It should also include significant funding for research and development on vaccines and other tools, some of which should go to CEPI, the organization I mentioned in the Introduction that gives grants to academic centers and private companies to get them to develop vaccines and vaccine technologies. . By the summer of 2021, CEPI had raised $1.8 billion for its COVID response, but it struggled to get funding for work on future pandemics.9 That's understandable-- when one disease is killing people around the world, it's hard to get donors to think about the disease that may emerge at some point in the future--but this is part of the billions we need to spend to save millions of lives and prevent trillions of dollars of economic losses in the future. . One area in which CEPI can contribute is the creation of vaccines that would be effective against entire families of viruses, also known as universal vaccines. Today's COVID vaccines teach your immune system to attack part of the spike protein on the surface of one specific Coronavirus. But researchers are now working on vaccines that would target shapes that show up on all coronaviruses, including COVID and its cousins, and would even be likely to appear on ones that evolve in the future. With a universal coronavirus vaccine, your body would be ready to fight viruses that don't even exist yet. SARS* and influenza viruses should be the targets of these vaccines, since they were responsible for t the worst outbreaks of the past twenty years. . * Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.