Investment in global health research, prevention and preparedness has not kept pace with an increasing frequency and intensity of infectious disease epidemics, a new report from the World Health Organization shows, and experts are warning the world could be less prepared for the next pandemic than it was for COVID.
Firefighters prepare to conduct disinfection at the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport on April 3, 2020 in Wuhan, the Chinese city hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
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The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, established by the WHO and World Bank, said in a report out Monday that the "real, near term risk of another pandemic” is that it “would strike a world more divided, more indebted and less able to protect its people than it was a decade ago."
The report warns that, if another pandemic were to strike soon, countries around the world would be exposed to potentially greater health, social and economic impacts than they suffered from pandemics past, despite officials having considerably more knowledge, tools and resources.
The report found that infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent, deadlier, are causing more harm to the economy and are leaving the societies they touch “poorer, more unequal, and more divided.”
Rising costs, declining public financing, rising inequality and eroding trust—between countries and their citizens, and countries themselves—are why the board is raising the alarm, the report says, labeling "the profound erosion of trust and equity" as the No. 1 cause for concern.
"Despite considerably more knowledge, tools and resources, the trajectory of pandemic risk is moving in the wrong direction," the report says.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board specifically calls out declining pandemic preparedness funding as a result of faltering political attention. The report says countries are investing less in global health and systemic resilience, making “the potential impact of future outbreaks significantly greater.” While it doesn’t mention President Donald Trump by name, his administration recently redirected $2 billion in global health funding to cover the cost of shuttering USAID, the agency responsible for leading the country's global efforts to combat infectious disease. Analysis from the Health Security Policy Academy says the funding cut could lead to an estimated 121,000 preventable deaths from tuberculosis, and at least 47,600 preventable deaths from malaria.
Whether leaders heed the board's advice. Monday's report makes several recommendations for how political leaders and stakeholders can "change the trajectory of global preparedness" by establishing independent pandemic risk monitoring, enforcing policies to ensure countries have equitable access to pandemic countermeasures and establishing sustainable financing "not subject to annual political negotiation."
Global eyes turned to pandemic preparedness this month after an outbreak of a rare and deadly hantavirus strain on a cruise ship killed three people. Exposed passengers from the cruise had departed and returned to their homes around the world before health officials knew of the outbreak, prompting alarm in a half-dozen countries as several people tested positive for the contagious hantavirus variant. Global health officials have continuously warned that the variant, called Andes, would not cause another pandemic for several reasons—largely its need for close, prolonged contact to spread—but the incident still sparked fears and led to a worldwide contact tracing and containment effort that, so far, seems to have been successful. More than a dozen cruise passengers who returned to America last week are in isolation at the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska, where they’ll be for weeks to come as they wait out the 42-day incubation period for the virus. The WHO on Saturday also declared an ongoing Ebola outbreak in Africa an “extraordinary” public health emergency, though it has not reached pandemic criteria, and marks the 17th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past half century, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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