A study published in BMJ Global Health in July 2023 by researchers from the Brown University School of Public Health, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) found that vast majority of countries that entered the COVID-19 pandemic…
The Global Health Security (GHS) Index, developed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security with Economist Impact, was first launched in October 2019 followed by the second publication in December 2021. The Index measures 195 countries’ capacities to detect, respond to, and respond from…
While the 2021 Global Health Security Index reported that all countries remain dangerously vulnerable to future biological threats, it also showed marked improvements in preparedness in recent years for four nations. Released in December 2021, most recent version of the Index shows New Zealand, Lithuania, Chile, and Georgia improving their…
Two years after publication of the inaugural edition of the Global Health Security Index, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between excess mortality during the pandemic and national preparedness as defined by the index. To better inform the future iterations of the GHS Index,…
Although the GHS Index measures capacities and identifies preparedness gaps, it cannot predict how leaders will use national assets when a crisis occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that some of the countries identified by the 2019 GHS Index to have the greatest health security capacities, such as the United States…
Nearly two years after the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, some lessons from the pandemic are clear: Countries’ ability to measure the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths depend on their having public health capacities such as diagnostic and screening tests,…
Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBRs) refer to biological risks of unprecedented scale, with devastating outcomes that are orders of magnitude greater than what the world has witnessed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such events could cause such significant and irreparable damage to human civilization that they undermine its long-term potential. Although…
The world will be assessing the factors that contributed to the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic for years to come. GHS Index team members took stock of the current information and thinking about what factors mattered most in responding to the virus as they developed the 2021 GHS Index framework,…
Data related to epidemic and pandemic preparedness, such as disease surveillance, health system, and response capacity data, should be publicly available so that officials within and beyond country borders understand the nature and magnitude of the threat and the tools available to contain it. Data transparency allows for better decision…
By regularly releasing data on countries’ health security capacities, the GHS Index aims to generate additional political will for resources to fill identified gaps. By design, the GHS Index is meant to bolster the Joint External Evaluation (JEE) process, which is a WHO led independent, collaborative, and multi-sectoral assessment of…