Tech billionaires are already mounting a pressure campaign to prevent the next pandemic

A new initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, is lobbying for better pandemic response efforts in the future. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

This push is one of the few coronavirus initiatives focused on political advocacy. Hillary Clinton wore a black breathing mask imprinted with the word “VOTE” in Twitter and Instagram posts this weekend, posing in what appeared as a homespun effort to pitch “the must-have accessory for spring.” The posts bear an unassuming hashtag: #MaskingForAFriend.
But behind this hashtag and those fun posts — as well as similar ones by celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger — are a group of tech billionaires trying to answer a weighty, almost existential question: How can we make sure a devastating pandemic never happens again?
That’s one of the main focuses for a group formed by major tech philanthropists including Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, who are behind a new push to cajole overseas governments to more fully fund international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO). The group, called the Pandemic Action Network , is behind the #MaskingForAFriend campaign that seeks to change personal behavior. But its more important ambition is to change government behavior.
This initiative is one of the more forward-looking attempts from philanthropy to shape what the world looks like after the crisis, and one of the few focused on political advocacy.
The push is small for now, with just $1.5 million in initial cash from Schmidt Futures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other backers. But the Pandemic Action Network aims to lead a pressure campaign that shapes the policy debate, a debate that will be at the fore of the next wave of pandemic response efforts.

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No makeup? No pantsuit? No problem. ⁣ ⁣ I’ve got the must-have accessory for spring.⁣ ⁣ I’m wearing a mask (and voting!) for my country, my community, and my grandchildren. #MaskingForAFriend A post shared by Hillary Clinton (@hillaryclinton) on May 2, 2020 at 7:57am PDT

Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who led program advocacy at the Gates Foundation for a decade and then a $100 million push by billionaire Paul Allen to combat Ebola, can recall many times when international institutions issued reports sounding the alarm — then languished with inadequate follow-up — or made bold promises that they wouldn’t meet. For instance, after the Ebola crisis, the WHO in 2015 set out to raise a $100 million contingency fund for emergency response but has only raised about $46 million to date.
Filling that funding gap is one of the things that Fitzgerald, now the Pandemic Action Network’s co-founder, would have pushed for.
Other causes that Fitzgerald’s new group might take up include pressuring foreign governments to fund the Gates-founded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations,...