Resolve to Save Lives

Resolve to Save Lives is a global public health NGO founded in 2017 by Tom Frieden, former Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The organisation is housed within Vital Strategies, a global health organisation, and is funded primarily by philanthropic sources including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It has offices in New York and operates primarily through country-level partnerships in Africa and Asia.

Resolve to Save Lives runs two principal programme areas. Its cardiovascular disease prevention programme focuses on reducing sodium in food supplies, controlling hypertension through medication, and eliminating industrially produced trans fats — public health interventions with large aggregate mortality impact. Its epidemic prevention programme centres on building country-level systems for early outbreak detection and response, and is the source of the 7-1-7 framework: a standard requiring that an outbreak be detected within 7 days of emergence, notified to authorities within 1 day of detection, and responded to within 7 days of notification. The 7-1-7 metric has been adopted by WHO as a core preparedness benchmark.

Frieden's personal prominence — as a major figure in Ebola response, CDC leadership, and global smoking cessation campaigns — gives Resolve outsized policy influence relative to its size. The organisation publishes country-level 7-1-7 performance data and advocates publicly for preparedness investment.

Resolve to Save Lives is relevant in the pandemics-and-biosecurity context as the organisation that developed and promotes the 7-1-7 outbreak response standard, which serves as a benchmark for assessing whether national systems would have caught the Andes hantavirus or H5N1 signals earlier. Its founder Tom Frieden has been a prominent voice in public debate about USDA H5N1 surveillance policy and the adequacy of US outbreak preparedness.