Four Lessons From a Painful Pandemic Year

In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I delve into four lessons from a painful pandemic year: the planet is out of balance, endangering human health; global health cooperation is precarious; the WHO is underpowered and underfunded; and even strong countries can be fragile.

As COVID-19 starts to loosen its grip on the world, it makes sense to ask what we’ve learned from this punishing experience, so that we can be better prepared when the next pandemic strikes—which it will. Although it will take years to absorb the plague’s many lessons, here are four insights from the past year that should inform multilateral pandemic preparedness in the months and years ahead.

The planet is out of balance, endangering human health. This pandemic has been severe, but it should not have come as a surprise. The past half-century has seen a surge in zoonoses, or viruses that can jump from animal to human hosts, including Ebola, SARS, H1N1, MERS and Zika, among others. Their emergence is a function of our assault on the natural world. As we encroach upon and degrade ecosystems, we and our domesticates come into contact with previously isolated wild species and their pathogens. According to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, humans may be susceptible to 850,000 of the 1.7 million undiscovered viruses thought to infect birds and mammals. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before a novel, highly contagious virus emerged and exploited global transportation links to spread to every country on Earth.

Read the full World Politics Review article here.