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Bloomberg Businessweek February 8, 2021unknown mammal viruses, many of which could spill over
into humans with just a few mutations. He and his collaborators
calculate that it would cost a little more than $1 billion to iden-
tify two-thirds of these pathogens by sampling wild animal
populations around the world. Doing this would give scientists
clues about which viruses pose the greatest risk to humans,
allowing communities situated in potential hot spots to focus
on reducing spillover risk and helping governments and
research institutions allocate resources for further study.
If we had a better handle on what was happening patho-
genically, we could work to identify the outbreaks that have
the most potential to become severe, says Caitlin Rivers,
an epidemi ologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health
Security. Imagine a kind of National Weather Service for pan-
demics that would predict the course of emerging pathogens.
These official forecasts would be more authoritative than the
hodgepodge of competing disease models out there now, mak-
ing it easier for governments to undertake potentially unpop-
ular mitigation measures such as closing borders or ordering
lockdowns before an outbreak takes hold.
During the Covid pandemic, the opposite happened. In
late February, right before its hospitals were overrun, Milan’s
city government unveiled a campaign called “Milan does
not stop,” which encouraged people to visit tourist attrac-
tions and go out to dinner. In the U.S. many local leaders
hesitated before imposing harsh social distancing measures.
Had restrictions come only one week earlier, according to
research from Columbia, 32,000 lives would have been saved
by early May. “It’s about giving decision-makers enough con-
fidence so they feel comfortable acting,” Rivers says. And an
epidemic forecasting center would be a relative bargain, cost-
ing the U.S. only $100 million to $150 million a year, she esti-
mates. The Biden administration is planning to create one.- Repairing and augmenting the WHO
Pandemic surveillance and response, almost by definition,
are global efforts, which means it’s time to consider a new
global partnership to oversee them. The World Health
Organization’s structural shortcomings have been well doc-
umented. The main international body charged with fighting
disease, it’s been criticized by the U.S. and others for being
overly deferential to China and for being slow to declare the
outbreak a global emergency. The agency responds that it
has to remain diplomatic while collecting information and
that it can’t force member states to reply to it. Still, the spat
led the U.S. to announce last year that it was withdrawing,
further weakening the body at a key moment.
This dispute, like so many aspects of the Covid catastro-
phe, was predictable. The current pandemic response sys-
tem relies on transparency. Governments are supposed to
alert the international community at the first sign of danger.
But of course leaders, worried about damaging their national
economies or their personal political prospects, often clam
up at the crucial moment and withhold data the rest of
the world needs. China was slow to admit the magnitude of
the problem in Wuhan early last year and didn’t immediately
let international health experts into the city to assess the
threat. In the U.S., President Trump confronted the loom-
ing crisis by dismissing it, repeatedly assuring Americans
that Covid would simply go away. “One day, it’s like a mir-
acle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 27, just as the virus
was taking off.
Thomas Bollyky, who heads the global health program
at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that none of
this is new. “This is a repeated problem,” he says. China was
slow to acknowledge the SARS outbreak in 2003, and in 2014
officials in West Africa took months to recognize that mys-
terious illnesses in remote areas were being caused by the
Ebola virus, allowing it to travel from rural areas, where it
probably could have been contained, to cities. In a recent
report, Bollyky and his colleagues recommended develop-
ing a system that bypasses central government bureaucrats
and monitors anonymized data, such as rising cases of unex-
plained pneumonia, gathered directly from hospitals around
the world. It was a locally run project, the Seattle Flu Study,
that first spotted community spread of Covid in the U.S.
In January an independent panel convened by the WHO
blasted the current epidemic alert system as “slow, cumber-
some, and indecisive.” In theory the WHO, which Biden
has said the U.S. will rejoin, could be given more teeth. But
some argue that the world might need a new coalition of
countries to more effectively coordinate response. Richard
Hatchett, chief executive officer for the Coalition for Epidemic
Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an organization that’sworked to accelerate the development of Covid vaccines since
it started up in 2017, has suggested an alliance committed to
a less cautious approach—a “biological NATO” to defend the
world against developing pathogens. This group could help
countries respond much more rapidly to future threats. “It’s
not part of the world against any other part of the world, but
the world against the viruses,” Hatchett says.
A muscular global health coalition could further provide
funding to eliminate “wet markets,” where wild animals are
sold for food, and to discourage jungle deforestation, which