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 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The organisation is housed within Vital Strategies and funded primarily by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It runs two principal programme areas: a cardiovascular disease prevention programme targeting sodium, hypertension, and trans fats; and an epidemic prevention programme that developed the 7-1-7 framework, a detection-notification-response standard now adopted by WHO as a core preparedness benchmark. The 7-1-7 metric requires 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.

Resolve and Frieden have been consistently critical of US outbreak surveillance decisions in 2026. The organisation argues that the DRC Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak is a direct test of the 7-1-7 benchmark: the CDC's own modelling (R0 = 2.51) puts the outbreak on a PATH to 20,000 cases by August 2026 if patient isolation stays below 20%, but the isolation rate as of 14 June was only 45.9%, still short of the 70% collapse threshold. The US response has oscillated between a 30-day entry ban on nationals of DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan, which expired unresolved around 17 June and was renewed on 21 June, three days after a France importation case that the ban could not have stopped as it applied only to those nationals, not French citizens. Frieden's public health perspective frames travel bans as a distraction from the foundational 7-1-7 response work: contact tracing, isolation, and healthcare worker protection.