Nordic Life Science 1
HEALTH // EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS 58 I N FIVE SMAL
L ADJOINING US states, the authorities decide to invest huge sums of money in research into the disease, and to do so quickly. Each of the states organizes its own research calls, finances its own researchers, and establishes its own research groups and projects. No attempt is made to work together on the calls or to co-ordinate efforts across state borders. Although this is an imagined scenario, it’s roughly how things went in the Nordic countries when the COVID19 pandemic reached our shores in March 2020. All the Nordic countries reacted quickly and released large sums of money for national research on COVID-19. In the spring of 2021, NordForsk conducted a survey among public and private research financiers in the Nordic Region. This resulted in the report Funding for COVID19 related research in the Nordic countries 2020-2021. We contacted the financiers directly and asked how much money they had allocated to COVID-19-related calls and what type of research they had financed. The financiers reported that, within a year of the start of the outbreak, they had invested roughly 3.3 billion NOK in research related to COVID-19 and combating the disease. Of this, around NOK 1.9 billion went to research in medicine and health. Just shy of 600 million NOK went to research in the social sciences, and a little more than 300 million NOK was allocated to innovation, primarily to areas specializing in health. The grants were national and, as far as we know, the calls were announced without any attempt to collaborate or co-ordinate efforts across national borders in the Nordics. There was also little attempt to co-ordinate research efforts between different financiers within the same country. NordForsk also announced a small Nordic-Baltic COVID call in May 2020. A total of 57 million NOK was granted across five projects. Each project had partners from at least three Nordic countries, or from two Nordic countries and one Baltic country. The projects have, so far, published very interesting results about COVID and mental health, the risk to pregnant women and unborn babies following vaccination, and the risk of COVID in smokers and users of snuff. Common to all the projects is that they have used national health data across national borders. In a short space of time, they have been able to study COVID in large populations and thereby obtain more reliable results than had they only used one country’s data. In reality, it wouldn’t have been possible to conduct these studies individually in any of the Nordic countries in such a short time frame and with such reliable results. ”IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME, THEY HAVE BEEN ABLE TO STUDY COVID IN LARGE POPULATIONS AND THEREBY OBTAIN MORE RELIABLE RESULTS THAN HAD THEY ONLY USED ONE COUNTRY’S DATA.” Although the Nordic countries’ health data gives us incredible opportunities to conduct good health research in the Nordic Region, there are legal, technical, and practical obstacles between countries and registers that make data sharing difficult and time-consuming. The Nordic Council of Ministers took note of this and established the Nordic Commons project under the auspices of NordForsk. T 58 | NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG he purpose of Nordic Commons is to make it simpler to share and use health data for research and innovation across national borders in the Nordic Region. Back in the autumn of 2019, we didn’t know which agent would cause the next pandemic or when the next pandemic would come, but a health crisis was already looming. A pandemic was high on the emergency preparedness authorities’ list of crises that could affect Nordic society. And yet despite this, we were unprepared when it actually happened. We had inadequate plans for what to do in the event of a pandemic, and we had pandemic plans that were unusable because they’d been developed to fight the flu virus and not the coronavirus. HEALTH // COLUMN