The novel coronavirus is just the latest, and it is unlikely to be the last. Since 1940, hundreds of new pathogens have caused outbreaks around the world, most of them originating in the bodies of animals. But doing so will require a fundamental restructuring of the global economy and the current way of life, which rests upon the accelerating consumption of natural resources.
This means that humans can do more to avert pandemics, reducing the risk that pathogens erupt in our bodies in the first place and minimizing the probability that they will spread. And Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, calls for more funding for government health agencies.īut a wide range of potentially more effective and lasting interventions becomes possible when pandemics are understood in a different light: not as arbitrary calamities but instead as probabilistic events, made more likely by human agency. Former White House biodefense adviser Rajeev Venkayya suggests improved disease surveillance. Bill Gates recommends researching and developing vaccines and mobilizing soldiers and medical workers. The most society can do to gird itself, in that case, is hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The emerging conventional wisdom casts pandemics as fundamentally inscrutable and unpredictable, comparable to natural disasters and acts of terror. The effectiveness of our protections against future pandemics will hinge upon how we think about where they come from.
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