The LAST PANDEMIC

“We’re not ready for the next epidemic,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates cautioned in 2015. The next catastrophically deadly global event, he predicted, was “most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.”

In 2019, Johns Hopkins researchers issued an even more specific warning. In the article “Characteristics of Microbes Most Likely to Cause Pandemics and Global Catastrophes,” a team led by physician Amesh Adalja identified respiratory transmission as the “mechanism most likely to lead to pandemic spread.” They noted that “diseases that are contagious prior to symptom development” pose the greatest risk, especially if a significant proportion of the human population were “immunologically naïve to the agent,” and that the ability to latch onto common cellular receptors located throughout the human body would make such a pathogen highly infectious. Finally, they singled out RNA viruses emerging from an animal species as the “most probable” cause of such a pandemic.

In a September 2019 report, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank warned that “there is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5 percent of the world’s economy.” The authors added, “A global pandemic on that scale would be catastrophic, creating widespread havoc, instability and insecurity. The world is not prepared.”

These predictions proved horrifically correct: Gates identified the type of threat. The COVID-19 virus ticks every one of the boxes specified by the Johns Hopkins researchers for a microbe capable of causing a global catastrophic biological risk. And although COVID-19 deaths, fortunately, amount so far to only about 5 percent of the dire scenario sketched in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board report, the World Bank estimates that the global economy did contract by 4.3 percent in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.

“This will not be the last pandemic, nor the last global health emergency,” declared WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a September 2020 report. A World in Disorder estimated that the world’s governments had already spent $11 trillion (of often borrowed money) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far resulted in 115 million diagnosed cases and 2.6 million deaths.

But take heart: There are good reasons to believe that the WHO director-general is wrong. The greatly speeded-up biomedical innovation provoked by the current global scourge has provided future generations with tools to keep subsequent viral invasions at bay. These include fast new vaccine production platforms, the development of better diagnostic and disease surveillance monitoring, and progress in the rapid design of therapeutics.

Calibrating the role of governments in staving off future threats remains a challenge. But the horrors of the last year have spurred humanity to quickly develop an unprecedentedly flexible and powerful toolkit that may well make COVID-19 the last true pandemic.

VACCINES

“HOPEFULLY IN THE not too distant future, in a year, year and a half, two years, we’ll have a vaccine,” said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield