SPEECH BY MR ONG YE KUNG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND COORDINATING MINISTER FOR SOCIAL POLICIES, AT PATHGEN PREVIEW EVENT, 1 DECEMBER 2025

Ms Ho Ching, Chairman, Temasek Trust

Ms Jennie Chua, Chairman, Temasek Foundation

Mr Ng Boon Heong, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Temasek Foundation

Partners, friends

            A very good morning. Thank you for hosting this event and inviting me to the Temasek Shophouse. I am pleased to join you today to preview this important initiative on pandemic preparedness and global health security.

2.             COVID-19 was a pivotal event that reshaped the way we think about global health security. Policy makers, scientists, and clinicians all around the world took a fundamental relook at the way we conduct disease surveillance, outbreak response, and international collaboration. That is the good news. 

3.             So based on this trajectory, we will be better prepared for the next global pandemic like COVID-19, and it has a 2% chance of occurring every year. If you do the math, it means that in the next two decades, there is a one in three chance that we will face another global pandemic.

4.             The bad news is that this renewed determination and enthusiasm, does not appear to be sustainable. Memories of the pandemic have started to fade. People want to put the episode behind them and worry about other problems in life. The spread of infectious diseases has disappeared from media headlines, and governments have shifted their priorities. 

5.             So when the next pandemic hits, I think we may regret our inability to sustain our focus post COVID-19. And in Singapore, we must try to avoid that. Indeed, the ability to always anticipate and work on problems before they explode is a hallmark of Singapore, and we must somehow buck this global trend. 

Learning from Crises

6.             So what are the priorities to work on now, to better prepare ourselves for the next pandemic, when things are not urgent and things feel peaceful? What are these priorities?

7.             The experience of SARS is instructive. A key lesson is the importance of minimising the infection rate in the population. For SARS, we did this very diligently, very robustly, through contact tracing and quarantine. Because SARS was less infectious, we managed to keep the reproduction number, or R, below one and snuffed out the virus in a few months.

8.             This capability proved invaluable 17 years later, as COVID-19 broke out. Slowing down the spread of infection bought us precious time. But as the COVID-19 virus mutated and became more infectious from the Delta variant onwards, contact tracing and quarantine could not drive R below one, and infection numbers escalated. 

9.             This taught us a new lesson: when we cannot hold the infection rate down, and massive infections are inevitable, we do the next best thing – we keep the severity rate down. And the key to that is vaccination and therapeutics. The ability to develop effective vaccines and therapeutics, secure regulatory approvals, procure sufficient quantities, assure the population that the vaccines are good for them, and administer the vaccines to the population, has become a critical set of capabilities for pandemic preparedness.   

10.         So it is also reasonable to anticipate a scenario where we cannot keep the infection rate down, where we cannot keep the severity rate down. Then what happens? And that was the challenge confronted by many countries during COVID-19, when severely ill patients overwhelmed the hospitals. Then the battle shifts to the hospitals, and hospitals will need to do their best to keep fatality rates down. In Thailand, many field hospitals were set up to tend to these patients, and I understand they helped a great deal in lowering the fatality rate. 

11.         Fortunately, during COVID-19, the situation did not come to that in Singapore because we were able to moderate the infection rate and also the severity rate. 

Priorities in Pandemic Preparedness

12.         Hence in my view, pandemic preparedness boils down to taking early action to anticipate the three challenges of keeping the infection rate, severity rate and fatality rate as low as possible. Over the past few years, we undertook many pandemic preparedness initiatives in anticipation of these challenges.

13.         For example, to manage the spread of infection, we stepped up surveillance to give ourselves maximum response time. We are partnering many foreign agencies to facilitate data sharing. We continue island-wide wastewater testing in order to have the ability to quickly step-up testing of pathogens of interest when needed. So constantly, we are collecting wastewater for testing. We maintain a posture of vigilance at the border, and this may explain some of the questions you have in your mind: why do you always have to fill in an arrival card when you are flying to Singapore, regardless of your nationality. It is really a posture of vigilance. It is a simple arrival card, conveying questions that can be updated at very short notice depending on external disease threats.

14.         Of note, we have a close collaboration with GISAID (or Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which, because of its unique data ownership policy, is the largest international source of genomic data on Influenza, COVID-19, mpox, respiratory syncytial virus, dengue, and chikungunya. 

15.         To moderate the severity rate, Singapore is an active participant in the 100-day Mission. This is led by CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which aims to develop an effective vaccine within 100 days, when the next pandemic arrives. 

16.         In the years after COVID-19, Singapore has also attracted several international investments in vaccine production, across technological platforms, including a significant fill and finish facility. We are engaging and working with them to explore the possibilities to pivot from peace time to pandemic production when required. Singapore is quite small, our needs are also small, so whatever production capacity there are in Singapore is mainly for the region and for the world.

17.         To better prepare our healthcare system, we have strengthened the resilience of our hospitals to infectious diseases and expanded the NCID, National Centre for Infectious Diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we introduced a new inpatient setting, which we now call TCFs, Transitional Care Facilities. Today, they care for patients who are medically stable and do not need acute hospital care and are awaiting long-term care arrangements. TCF capacity can be quickly set up and converted to support disease outbreak requirements when needed. Within six months, we can gut an old school, for example, and turn it into a healthcare facility.

18.         To better integrate these measures, we amended the Infectious Diseases Act to accord the Government more flexibility to implement a range of pandemic preparedness measures. We consolidated pandemic preparedness capabilities in a new statutory board called the CDA, Communicable Diseases Agency, and as a counterpart to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all around the world.

19.         In implementing these pandemic preparedness initiatives, we learned one thing, which is the partnership with the private sector is essential and invaluable. Look at all our medical countermeasures, from vaccines, therapeutics, masks and test kits, they are developed and produced by the private sector. The private sector is also a key partner in logistics, IT, in setting up TCFs, in operating quarantine facilities, and administering tests and vaccinations. The GISAID, that I mentioned earlier, the data sharing platform, is also privately run.

PathGen

20.         Hence, I am delighted to preview an important initiative by the non-Government sector today which is PathGen.

21.         The Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness is developing the PathGen platform with support from the Temasek Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Philanthropy Asia Alliance.

22.         PathGen aims to integrate and analyse multiple data streams: genomic sequencing data, clinical information, mobility patterns of humans and animals, and environmental factors including climate data. It then uses its AI model to identify emerging communicable disease threats. Importantly, it may be able to extract insights about pathogens far more rapidly than traditional methods, for example, estimate incubation periods, reproduction numbers, case fatality rates, transmission modes, vulnerable population segments, and predicting outbreak trajectories. These are all simple parameters that we had no clue of when COVID-19 broke out. It took us a while to understand how we transmit wearing a mask, took us a while to understand that it affects old people more and not so much young people, which led us to keeping schools open, which has tremendous impact even till today. So all these basic parameters need to be decided as accurately as possible at the outset and I hope PathGen can do that.

Closing

23.         In closing, I mentioned the sense of vigilance against pandemics is waning around the world, unfortunately. That said, initiatives like PathGen, help instil and restore this culture of vigilance. Every time you fly into Singapore, you fill in the SG Arrival Card, it is to instil a culture of vigilance, so bear with us. In Singapore, be it the public, academia or private sectors, we must continually contribute our expertise, facilitate regional cooperation, and help build intelligent capabilities and systems that prepare us for future threats and pandemic diseases.