Why the next pandemic may ‘catch us napping’ despite all we’ve learnt from Covid
The next pandemic will probably “catch the world napping” despite all the advances made during Covid, the top international body tasked with ensuring preparedness has warned.
Many of the defining features of the modern world – from urbanisation and intensive farming to inequality and the advent of artificial intelligence – are driving up the risk of a new pandemic, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board said in its annual report on Monday, calling for urgent action to improve readiness.
The warning comes with the world seemingly a hair-trigger away from another test of global preparedness – H5N1 bird flu is continuing to jump from infected cattle and poultry to humans in the United States, and a new variant of mpox with pandemic potential is spreading rapidly in Central Africa.
And even while the report was being finalised, an outbreak of Marburg – a cousin of Ebola with a fatality rate of up to 88 per cent – has flared in Rwanda, killing more than a dozen people and prompting a race to contain the virus.
“Changing patterns of life and the ongoing encroachment of human activities into natural environments” are “altering the global risk landscape and making the emergence of new pathogens more likely,” the report’s authors state.
But while great scientific and technological strides were made when countries came together to fight Covid-19, epidemics are even more likely to occur today – epidemics for which the world is ill-prepared.
“Humanity is better equipped than ever to contain outbreaks at source; it has better medical interventions that can reduce morbidity and mortality, and is better organised to respond through international frameworks such as the International Health Regulations,” the authors write.
“Despite these improvements, made in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is every likelihood that the next pandemic will again catch the world napping, without the readiness plans primed for implementation from day one.”
‘The world is not ready for the next pandemic’
The GPMB, an independent body convened by the Director-General of the World Health Organisation and the President of the World Bank, arrived at three critical recommendations for governments and other organisations focusing on pandemic planning.
The first is to prioritise risk profiles and assessments that account for a broad range of factors including those like conflict or climate change that drive up the risk of new epidemics emerging, or those that will impact the world’s ability to respond such as digital connectivity and biomedical innovation.
World leaders must also prioritise equity in their preparedness plans, making sure they “address the specific and basic needs of vulnerable populations,” in particular, access to “medical countermeasures” like vaccines or treatments.
Finally, the GPMB called for collaboration between different sectors to be strengthened.
Joy Phumaphi, a former Minister of Health of Botswana and GPMB co-Chair, said the recommendations amount to “a bold shift in how the global community approaches preparedness”.
As it stands though, the world is not ready for another pandemic, she said.
“The world is not ready for the next pandemic. Africa is not ready, Europe is not ready, the Americas are not ready, Oceania is not ready and Asia is not ready,” she told a media briefing ahead of the report’s publication.
Achieving a heightened level of global preparedness requires mitigating those aspects of modern life like urbanisation or inequity that the report calls risk drivers.
Of the 15 risk drivers identified by the GPMB, it named four as having the greatest impact on the level of risk.
The movement of people around the world “is at a record high and is likely to continue to increase in the coming years,” it says, while a dramatic increase in global livestock numbers is already driving the spread of H5N1.
At the same time, the rise of social media means people everywhere are increasingly being exposed to misinformation, and “public health organisations and governments are struggling to keep up”.
But the final top risk driver identified by the GPMB is perhaps the most fundamental.
“There has been a decline in trust in many countries, distrust in institutions is growing and trust in the multilateral system is at risk,” the authors state. “This is impacting our collective capacity both to tackle health emergencies and to find multilateral solutions to protect the world.”
Trust in governments, in institutions and in public health organisations suffered during the pandemic, amid rancorous division over lockdown measures, quarantine requirements and vaccination programmes.
The period also gave rise to a highly-energised and far-reaching conspiracy movement, which continues to sow discord around matters of public health and looms darkly over the process of preparing for threats the future holds.
In 2023, for example, a quarter of people in Britain said they believed the Covid pandemic was a hoax, with a similar proportion of Americans saying the same.
And in the developing world, the lack of medical countermeasures – first to fight Covid and now mpox – is perpetuating distrust in health authorities.
When asked how the damage can be repaired, Ms Phumaphi said action was the only way.
“The only way to rebuild that trust is to actually take care of these challenges,” she said. “We have to take actions that actually demonstrate that we can work together as a global community in an equitable manner.”
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