THE NEW YORK TIMES: Hantavirus, Ebola, COVID — if another pandemic breaks out will we be prepared?

For many people, the past month has brought unpleasant echoes of COVID: Mysterious deaths aboard a cruise ship, a virus that causes a deadly respiratory illness and talk of forced quarantines.

Before it had even become clear to scientists that the recent outbreak of hantavirus was not going to cause another pandemic, there was news of a rapidly escalating Ebola outbreak in central Africa, with hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of deaths.

Neither of these outbreaks is likely to ravage the world as the coronavirus did. The hantavirus can cause severe illness and death, but it’s not particularly contagious and tends to fizzle out.

The Ebola epidemic in Congo is scarier, but even that is likely to stay confined, for the most part, to Congo and its immediate neighbours, according to the World Health Organisation.

Still, together, they remind us all that outbreaks are inevitable and that the world needs to prepare to snuff them out before they turn into pandemics.

This was among the most pressing issues on the minds of health officials from all over the world who gathered last week for the annual meeting of the WHO.

The meeting kicked off with a new report suggesting that outbreaks are not only occurring more frequently, they’re also becoming more damaging — and the world is increasingly struggling to fight and recover from them.

The importance of cooperation

In some ways, we are in a much better place to tackle outbreaks than we were before COVID. Scientists have developed the ability to analyse new pathogens with breathtaking speed and accuracy and to make new vaccines remarkably quickly.

But COVID also divided the world. Richer countries hogged vaccines, giving out booster doses to their citizens before many in poorer countries received their first dose.

Within many countries, policies on lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates created political rifts and deepened mistrust in scientists.

These trends have intensified. One benchmark: Vaccines against the mpox virus reached low-income nations nearly two years after that outbreak began in 2022 — even slower than the shots for COVID did.

The challenge is apparent in the tortured negotiations, which also began in 2022, over a new pandemic treaty.

Low-income countries have said they are willing to swiftly share genetic sequences and samples of emerging pathogens — but only in exchange for equitable access to the tests, vaccines and treatments that are developed with that information. Richer countries have been unwilling to offer those guarantees.

The United States exits

The biggest blow to global health unspooled last year, when the Trump administration abruptly shut down the US Agency for International Development and ended the vast majority of foreign aid, shifting instead to agreements with individual countries, often with strings attached.

The administration also withdrew from the WHO and rejected a global framework that obligates countries to report outbreaks.

The impact of these decisions is becoming increasingly obvious. US officials were not among those investigating the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship, and they initiated their response nearly a month after the first death. And they only learned of the new Ebola outbreak nine days after the WHO first received the signal and alerted other global health authorities.

The US was once the undisputed leader in any outbreak. It coordinated the response, provided funding and expertise, and pushed partners to move faster.

The Ebola epidemic already suggests that the lack of American leadership translates at the very least to weaker surveillance of infectious diseases, delays in testing and a lack of crucial protective gear for healthcare workers on the front lines.

As the World Health Assembly drew to a close, health officials from all over the world left Geneva with urgent, painful reminders of the need to prepare for the next pandemic. Absent from all the discussions: the United States.

But viruses don’t respect borders, and as the world responds to Ebola and hantavirus, cross-country cooperation remains crucial to global health.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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