PANDEMIC risk is outpacing even a decade of investment, according to a new report from an expert group, tasked with global monitoring, launched on 18th May in the margins of the 79th World Health Assembly.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) found that as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent, they are also becoming more damaging, with widening health, economic, political and social impacts, and less capacity to recover from them.
Backwards Progress
A decade after Ebola exposed dangerous gaps in outbreak preparedness, and six years after COVID-19 turned those gaps into a global catastrophe, evidence shows that the world is not safer from pandemics, the GPMB found.
New initiatives have reportedly improved aspects of preparedness but, overall, efforts are being offset by the growing effects of rising geopolitical fragmentation, ecological disruption, and global travel, particularly amid development assistance falling to levels not seen since 2009.
The report, A World on the Edge: Priorities for a Pandemic‑Resilient Future, analyses a decade of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern, including Ebola, COVID-19, and mpox, assessing their impacts on health systems, economies, and societies.
On key measures, such as equitable access to diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, global progress is moving backwards, the GPMB reported.
Mpox vaccines reached affected low-income countries almost two years after the outbreak began: slower than the 17 months it took for COVID-19 vaccines.
Damage extends beyond health and economic impacts, the GPMB reported.
Both Ebola and COVID-19 damaged trust in government, civil liberties, and democratic norms, amplified by politicised responses, attacks on scientific institutions and polarisation that have outlasted the crises, leaving societies less resilient to the next emergency.
Pandemic Risk
The report emphasised that the real, near-term risk of another pandemic would trigger a world more divided, more indebted, and less able to protect its people than it was a decade ago, exposing all countries to potentially greater health, social and economic impacts.
It highlighted the potential of AI in improving preparedness, particularly in monitoring pandemic threats.
However, without effective governance and safeguards, the report found, digital technologies could, in fact, reduce health security and accelerate the access gaps that defined COVID-19.
H.E. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, Co-Chair, GPMB, Geneva, Switzerland, said: “The world does not lack solutions.
“But without trust and equity, those solutions will not reach the people who need them most.
“Political leaders, industry and civil society can still change the trajectory of global preparedness – if they turn their commitments into measurable progress before the next crisis strikes.”
The GPMB has identified three concrete priorities for political leaders to reverse these trends: establish a permanent, independent monitoring mechanism to track pandemic risk, advance equitable access to life-saving vaccines, tests, and treatments by concluding the Pandemic Agreement, and secure robust financing for both preparedness & ‘Day Zero’ response activities.
Leadership will be tested in 2026, the report concluded, as governments work to finalise the WHO Pandemic Agreement and to agree a meaningful United Nations political declaration on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
Featured image: blvdone on Adobe Stock
