The Nordic Pandemic Resilience and Preparedness Network (NordPrep) will make significant contributions to an issue that was highly debated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and likely will be in future pandemics: the impact of government-introduced pandemic interventions, and whether their benefits justify their costs and harms.
The numerous pandemic interventions implemented by governments to prevent the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus saved many lives but also placed a significant burden on society. These measures restricted daily activities, disrupted educational environments for children and youth, and limited the ability of relatives to see one another, including the elderly and frail in nursing homes at the end of their lives.
Although these interventions prevented illness, hospitalizations, and deaths, countries emerged from the pandemic without clear knowledge of their specific effects. Lack of knowledge on whether the benefits of pandemic interventions outweighed their burdens sparked deep polarization, leading to frequent and heated debates about the justification of these measures, including in the Nordic countries.
Research will play a crucial role in resolving these tensions and helping countries and communities become better prepared and more resilient in the face of future pandemic threats. International institutions like the European Centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organization stress that effective pandemic preparedness must include plans to generate timely, research-based knowledge to guide policymakers on when to implement interventions, how strict such measures should be, and how widely they should apply.
In NordPrep, the public health agencies of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden will come together with key stakeholders to improve how evidence on pandemic interventions is generated and used. By learning from pandemic response strategies across Nordic countries, we will identify ways to tackle the challenges of researching the effectiveness of interventions. The network will train a new generation of experts, create standardized research protocols that can be quickly deployed across Nordic countries, and position the region as a leader in effectiveness research on pandemic interventions in Europa and globally.
