The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic Is Coming

new independent report compiled at the request of the United Nations secretary-general warns that there is a “very real threat” of a pandemic sweeping the planet, killing up to 80 million people. A deadly pathogen, spread airborne around the world, the report says, could wipe out almost 5 percent of the global economy. And we’re not ready.

The ominous analysis was compiled by an independent panel, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), which was assembled last year in response to a request from the office of the U.N. secretary-general, and convened jointly by the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO). Co-chaired by the former WHO head and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and the head of the international Red Cross, Elhadj As Sy, the GPMB commissioned expert studies and issued a scathing attack on the political, financial, and logistical state of pandemic preparedness affairs.

“Preparedness is hampered by the lack of continued political will at all levels,” read the report. “Although national leaders respond to health crises when fear and panic grow strong enough, most countries do not devote the consistent energy and resources needed to keep outbreaks from escalating into disasters.”

With no intention of degrading the GPMB’s effort, I must sadly say that this core message has been shouted from the rafters many times before, with little discernable impact on tone-deaf political leaders, financial enterprises, or multinational institutions. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. It’s hard to know what, shy of a genuinely devastating pandemic of killer influenza or some currently unknown microbe, will motivate global leaders to take microscopic threats seriously.

In May 1989, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg gathered fellow Nobelists and a roster of extraordinary virus-hunters for a three-day meeting in Washington to consider a then bold hypothesis that viruses, far from being vanquished by modern medicine, were actually surging worldwide in animals and people, often in forms never previously seen. And air travel increasingly meant that an outbreak in an obscure location could spread to large cities, even make its way around the world. At the time, the exploding HIV/AIDS epidemic focused collective attention: If the incurable virus could claim millions of lives, what other threats might lurk? During the gathering I felt tensions rise by the hour, as the volume of evidence grew in support of the dire hypothesis.

The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine was sufficiently shaken by the meeting that it delved further, beyond the kingdom of viruses to all microbial threats, and in 1992 published a call to arms—a report that drew sufficient interest at U.S. President Bill Clinton’s White House to prompt the formal classification of emerging diseases as national-security threats in 1996.

In 1994 I published my book on the subject, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, arguing that human disruption of the global environment, coupled with behaviors that readily spread microbes between people and from animals to humans, guaranteed a global surge in epidemics, even an enormous pandemic. And in 2000, my book Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health demonstrated that outbreaks were aided and abetted by inept health systems, human behavior, and the complete lack of consistent political and financial support for disease-fighting preparedness everywhere in the world.

So what has changed?

An enormous number of previously unknown viruses, such as the one that caused the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), have claimed the lives of people and animals around the world. In just seven years (from 2011 to 2018), for example, the WHO did battle with 1,483 epidemics.

And the costs of containment, coupled with the disruptions’ general economic impact, have worsened, according to a GPMB study commissioned by the World Bank. The 2003 SARS epidemic exacted a toll of about $40 billion on the global economy, the 2009 swine flu epidemic reached about $50 billion, and the 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic cost nearly $53 billion. An influenza pandemic akin to the 1918 flu would today cost the world economy $3 trillion, or up to 4.8 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP).

Economically, wealthy nations have proven the most resilient in recent outbreaks, and the GPMB predicts that countries such as the United States and Germany could get through a devastating epidemic with less than 0.5 percent loss of GDP. But poorer nations—from India and Russia down to the countries of Central Africa—could lose up to 2 percent of their GDPs from the same hypothetical pandemic. The West African Ebola epidemic directly cost the hardest-hit countries—Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—$2.8 billion, knocking Sierra Leone’s GDP down a whopping 20 percent in 2015.

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