The Deadly Panic-Neglect Cycle in Pandemic Funding

It was the nightmare that wasn’t.

On July 20, 2014, as West Africa struggled to quash a historically large outbreak of Ebola, an infected man carried the virus to Lagos, Nigeria—Africa’s largest city. In that dense throng of 21 million people, many of whom travel extensively, it seemed that Ebola would be impossible to track and contain.

But Nigeria was ready. In the previous years, it has been using investments and support from the United States and other countries to boost its efforts to eradicate polio. When Ebola came, it swiftly redirected all of that infrastructure at the problem, including an emergency operations center, a crack team of epidemiologists trained by the U.S. Centers for Disease, and GPS systems that could be used to track potential cases. In the end, Nigeria in just three months, with only 19 cases and eight deaths.