The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?

The consequences of a divided and multipolar world are manifold, but the media, the public, and governments generally only focus on the biggest of items. Action on climate change, ending poverty, managing refugee flows, ending wars, are made more difficult in an increasingly fractured present. But this reversal of global cooperation, coupled with increasing interconnectedness, has also raised the risk of more invisible threats.

Pandemics have killed hundreds of millions of people through human history, and the emergence of a novel and deadly virus poses a considerable threat to civilisation. It is in a way the quintessential ‘Wild Card’ event in global society: we know it’s coming, we know it is going to have an immense impact; however, we just don’t know when.

Writing for The Atlantic, Ed Yong takes a look at how prepared the world is for the next major pandemic. Traveling from the jungles of the Congo, where Ebola first appeared, to high-tech isolation wards in the US, he paints a picture of a world vastly under-equipped to deal with viral threats. Moreover, he questions whether a United States, led by a man who regularly denies science, spreads conspiracy theories, and cares little about helping other countries, can really cope with such a situation.

After all, a doctrine of ‘America First’ simply means fighting a pandemic on American soil, rather than elsewhere.