Article in Harvard Business Review
In 2003 a doctor with SARS unknowingly infected several guests while staying at a Hong Kong hotel, and overnight the virus reached across the globe. China is currently battling a bird flu that kills nearly half of the people infected. If Ebola, which transmits through fluids, were spread by air, or if Zika, which has reached over 50 countries, were as deadly as Ebola, we would be facing an unprecedented catastrophe. An uncontrolled outbreak or bioterror attack could result in a contagion that kills over 30 million people.
We fear it is only a matter of time before we face a deadlier and more contagious pathogen, yet the threat of a deadly pandemic remains dangerously overlooked. Pandemics now occur with greater frequency, due to factors such as climate change, urbanization, and international travel. Other factors, such as a weak World Health Organization and potentially massive cuts to funding for U.S. scientific research and foreign aid, including funding for the United Nations, stand to deepen our vulnerability. We also face the specter of novel and mutated pathogens that could spread and kill faster than diseases we have seen before. With the advent of genome-editing technologies, bioterrorists could artificially engineer new plagues, a threat that Ashton Carter, the former U.S. secretary of defense, thinks could rival nuclear weapons in deadliness.
The two of us have advised the president of Guinea on stopping Ebola. In addition, we have worked on ways to contain the spread of Zika and have informally advised U.S. and international organizations on the matter. Our experiences tell us that the world is unprepared for these threats.
We urgently need to change this trajectory. We can start by learning four lessons from the gaps exposed by the Ebola and Zika pandemics.
Faster Vaccine Development
The most effective way to stop pandemics is with vaccines. However, with Ebola there was no vaccine, and only now, years later, has one proven effective. This has been the case with Zika, too. Though there has been rapid progress in developing and getting a vaccine to market, it is not fast enough, and Zika has already spread worldwide.
Many other diseases do not have vaccines, and developing them takes too long when a pandemic is already under way. We need faster pipelines, such as the one that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is trying to create, to preemptively develop vaccines for diseases predicted to cause outbreaks in the near future.
Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Even with such efforts, vaccines will not be ready for many diseases and would not even be an option for novel or artificially engineered pathogens. With no vaccine for Ebola, our next best strategy was to identify who was infected as quickly as possible and isolate them before they infected others. Because Ebola’s symptoms were identical to common illnesses like malaria, diagnosis required laboratory testing that could not be easily scaled. As a result, many patients were only tested after several days of being contagious and infecting others. Some were never tested at all, and about 40% of patients in Ebola treatment centers did not actually have Ebola.
Many dangerous pathogens similarly require laboratory testing that is difficult to scale. Florida, for example, has not been able to expand testing for Zika, so pregnant women wait weeks to know if their babies might be affected. What’s needed are point-of-care diagnostics that, like pregnancy tests, can be used by frontline responders or patients themselves to detect infection right away, where they live. These tests already exist for many diseases, and the technology behind them is well-established. However, the process for their validation is slow and messy. Point-of-care diagnostics for Ebola, for example, were available but never used because of such bottlenecks.
Greater Global Coordination
We need stronger global coordination. The responsibility for controlling pandemics is fragmented, spread across too many players with no unifying authority. In Guinea we forged a response out of an amalgam of over 30 organizations, each of which had its own priorities. In Ebola’s aftermath, there have been calls for a mechanismfor responding to pandemics similar to the advance planning and training that NATO has in place for its numerous members to respond to military threats in a quick, coordinated fashion.
This is the right thinking, but we are far from seeing it happen. The errors that allowed Ebola to become a crisis replayed with Zika, and the WHO, which should anchor global action, continues to suffer from a lack of credibility.
Stronger Local Health Systems
International actors are essential but cannot parachute into countries and navigate local dynamics quickly enough to contain outbreaks. In Guinea it took months to establish the ground game needed to stop the pandemic, with Ebola continuing to spread in the meantime. We need to help developing countries establish health systems that can provide routine care and, when needed, coordinate with international responders to contain new outbreaks.
Local health systems could be established for about half of the $3.6 billionultimately spent on creating an Ebola response from scratch. Access to routine care is also essential for knowing when an outbreak is taking root and establishing trust. For months, Ebola spread before anyone knew it was happening, and then lingered because communities who had never had basic health care doubted the intentions of foreigners flooding into their villages. The turning point in the pandemic came when they began to trust what they were hearing about Ebola and understood what they needed to do to halt its spread: identify those exposed and safely bury the dead.
With Ebola and Zika, we lacked these four things — vaccines, diagnostics, global coordination, and local health systems — which are still urgently needed. However, prevailing political headwinds in the United States, which has played a key role in combatting pandemics around the world, threaten to make things worse. The Trump administration is seeking drastic budget cuts in funding for foreign aid and scientific research. The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development may lose over one-third of their budgets, including half of the funding the U.S. usually provides to the UN. The National Institutes of Health, which has been on the vanguard of vaccines and diagnostics research, may also face cuts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been at the forefront of responding to outbreaks, remains without a director, and, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, would lose $891 million, 12% of its overall budget, provided to it for immunization programs, monitoring and responding to outbreaks, and other public health initiatives.
Investing in our ability to prevent and contain pandemics through revitalized national and international institutions should be our shared goal. However, if U.S. agencies become less able to respond to pandemics, leading institutions from other nations, such as Institut Pasteur and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, the Wellcome Trust and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs have done instrumental research and response work in previous pandemics), would need to step in to fill the void.
There is no border wall against disease. Pandemics are an existential threat on par with climate change and nuclear conflict. We are at a critical crossroads, where we must either take the steps needed to prepare for this threat or become even more vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before we are hit by a deadlier, more contagious pandemic. Will we be ready?