Epidemic diseases affect us all. They do not respect borders. CEPI is a innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations. We're working together to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable equitable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.
Our Leadership Team works across our three offices in Oslo, London and Washington D.C.
CEPI is a Norwegian Association. The primary governing body is the Board, which has 12 voting members (four investors and eight independent members representing competencies including industry, global health, science, resource mobilisation, finance) and five observers.
The Board is advised on decisions, such as prioritising pathogens and selecting development partners, by our Scientific Advisory Committee.
We have four Board Committees: Executive and Investment, Nominations, Compensation, Diversity and Inclusion, Audit and Risk, and Equitable Access, with members of our Board Committees listed below. Other Board members or experts may be called upon as advisers or observers as needed.
The Research Development and Manufacturing Investment Committee (RDMIC) is also accountable to the CEPI Board. The RDMIC is a multidisciplinary group providing investment decision recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine projects in the COVAX R&D and manufacturing portfolio. The RDMIC operates to ensure that the COVAX R&D and manufacturing portfolio supports achievement of COVAX’s strategic objectives, and is ultimately accountable to the CEPI Board. More information on their set-up and role is available here.
CEPI was founded in Davos by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and the World Economic Forum.
To date, CEPI has secured financial support from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, The Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, USAID, and Wellcome.
Additionally, CEPI has also received support from private sector entities as well as public contributions through the UN Foundation COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
Close collaboration with our partners is crucial for the success of our work.
See our full list of contributions and pledges.
All investors contributing to CEPI’s funding pool are invited to join our Investors Council. The council nominates Investor representatives to the Board and has some rights including approval any single investments over $100 m.
Each investor appoints one person to represent them on the Investors Council, serving as members for the duration of their pledged commitment.
The Investors Council receives regular updates from the CEPI team, shares information with CEPI and each other, provides guidance and oversight of CEPI activities, and engages in resource mobilisation efforts.
Four members of the CEPI Investors Council serve on the CEPI Board.
CEPI launches at 2017 Davos Meeting
The Scientific Advisory Committee is an independent body within the CEPI governing structure that provides world-class scientific support, advice, and guidance to CEPI staff and the CEPI Board in responding to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
They also deliver guidance and challenge towards CEPI’s US$3.5bn plan to mitigate or even dramatically reduce the threat of future pandemics and epidemics. Final decision-making about the issues addressed by the committee rests with CEPI staff or the Board.
Our Joint Coordination Group is a roundtable of independent institutions with an interest in seeing CEPI’s vaccines successfully developed and deployed in an outbreak.
These independent institutions play a role in various elements of the vaccine development lifecycle, from vaccine research and development all the way through to deploying vaccines during an outbreak.
Members of our Joint Coordination Group come together to discuss how we can best enhance our efforts to deliver and deploy vaccines by addressing challenges related to the research and development, regulation, stockpiling, and delivery of these products. In particular, while the group focuses on advancing our vaccine portfolio, its work also informs the broader field of vaccine development and preparedness.
Members also have a role in planning for rapid response to a priority pathogen or an unknown pathogen. Our Joint Coordination Group consists of 10 to 15 member organisations, which in turn appoint individuals to represent them at meetings.
From time to time, the group may choose to invite other organisations and experts to participate in meetings.
The current members of the Joint Coordination Group include:
World Health Organization (WHO)
Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance
European Medicines Agency (EMA)
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
UNICEF
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC)
The African Vaccine Regulatory Forum (AVAREF)
Wellcome
A destructive legacy of racism has led to deeply entrenched implicit biases and institutional racism, which have hurt countless people for generations. These inequalities are widespread and, as we have seen in the current COVID-19 pandemic, have led to stark inequities in access to healthcare and poorer health outcomes for affected communities globally.
Tackling this inequality is core to CEPI’s mission to ensure fair access to all the vaccines we develop. Through our strategic partnerships in countries around the world we also seek to build vaccine Research & Development capacity, strengthen domestic expertise, and nurture scientific talent. In response to COVID-19, we’ve launched the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) initiative, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Gavi, to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries, at all levels of development.
We are also committed to affecting positive change in the workplace and the principles of equality, inclusion, and non-discrimination guide all our internal and external policies. CEPI is a young organisation, launched in 2017, and our aim from the outset has been to build a diverse and inclusive organisation that reflects the populations we serve. We are proud to say that one in five of the CEPI team now come from low-income or middle-income countries and over half are women.
We also recognise that our executive leadership team does not reflect this diversity and our aim is to ensure we develop and implement a comprehensive plan to ensure that this goal of diversity at all levels is achieved over time. CEPI is a global coalition comprising members and representatives from all continents. We value the substantial geographical and cultural diversity of our partners and we welcome dialogue with them about the issue of racism and how we, as a coalition, can combat its negative effects.
We are determined to play our role in helping to overcome the challenges presented by institutional bias and discrimination. We accept that this won’t be easy and that we are not perfect, but we will persevere. CEPI believes positive and long-lasting change can only be achieved by learning from each other’s experiences and through collective action. A coalition by design, we will always stand together with our staff, our partners, and the communities that we serve around the world to push back against racism in all its forms.
At CEPI we oppose modern slavery in all its forms, and we are committed to ensuring that there is no slavery or human trafficking in our operations or our supply chain.
We are committed to improving our practices to combat slavery and human trafficking.
Our full statement is available to read here.
