LONDON — Health ministers from some of the world's largest democracies have committed to a new international agreement making it easier and quicker to share results from vaccines and therapeutic trials to tackle COVID-19 and prevent future health threats, according to a press statement issued by the British government on Friday. Following the conclusion of the UK-hosted, in-person G7 health ministers' meeting in Oxford, a Therapeutics and Vaccines Clinical Trials Charter will be rapidly implemented. This will help deliver high-quality, reliable and comparable evidence from international clinical trials to speed up access to approved treatments and vaccines, benefiting people in the UK and globally, the press statement read. This will include stronger collaboration in large-scale international trials to enable a greater diversity of participants, including pregnant people and children. The charter will also help to avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts, more quickly eliminate medicines that do not work and produce robust clinical evidence that can be extrapolated to a larger number of populations and places to save more lives. The agreement follows news that industry leaders are joining forces to step up collective efforts to save lives from diseases and tackle global pandemics, with a new commitment to protect against future pandemic threats and slash time to develop and deploy new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines to just 100 days. Commenting on the new charter, UK Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said: "It has been a huge pleasure to host the G7 Health Ministers meeting this week and I want to thank everyone who has taken part." "The landmark agreements we've reached in Oxford — which has been at the heart of the global response — show our commitment, not just to getting through the COVID-19 crisis, but also to make we're better prepared for future threats. According to the UK health secretary, the charter "contains a series of measures to make us all safer by improving clinical trials, quicker and wider access to safe vaccines, better use of data, more accurate health surveillance tools and greater collaboration between countries". Following G7 ministerial discussions, the sharing of new disease data to agreed standards, focused pandemic surveillance systems and measures to improve the security of antibiotic supply chains will all play central roles in preventing and combatting health emergencies for decades to come. There will be a thorough assessment of the international health security surveillance operations currently in place to ensure they meet the demands of a highly connected world and keep pace with advances in technology. This collaborative approach will support work to identify potential health threats across human, animal, plant and environmental ecosystems so we can act swiftly to prevent diseases from spreading and save lives.
