Global charitable foundation Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a non-profit organisation fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world, have each pledged USD150m to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to fund its COVID-19 pandemic response and help put it on better footing for future major health crises, Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday.

CEPI, an international coalition set up five years ago to prepare for future disease threats, aims in part to compress vaccine development timelines to 100 days, around a third of the time it took the world to develop the first COVID-19 vaccines.

Richard Hatchett, CEPI's chief executive, was quoted as telling reporters in a briefing: "The unprecedented spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant around the world over the past two months exemplifies the ways in which we must be ready both in terms of speed and the scale of our response to future threats. We must endeavour to take pandemic threats off the table if we can."

Hatchett said that delivering COVID-19 vaccines within 11 months was unprecedented, but not good enough. Had the vaccines been developed within 100 days, CEPI's pandemic goal, a COVID-19 vaccine could have been available as early as April 2020.

Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome, said an important lesson from the pandemic has been the need to have systems in place that allow for a rapid response when a crisis arrives.

"None of us believe Omicron will be the last variant or that COVID-19 will be the last pandemic," he said.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said research and development investment should be commensurate with the future risk of pandemics.

This latest pledge by the Gates Foundation brings the charity's investment in CEPI to USD270m over the last five years and its total pandemic investment to USD2bn.

CEPI had made early investments in 14 COVID-19 vaccine candidates. It is also working on next-generation COVID-19 vaccines effective across variants and future coronaviruses in the same family.