World needs ambitious plan for next pandemic

We need a master plan of pandemic preparedness to protect ourselves from the certainty of future epidemics and pandemics.

Infectious disease has killed more people than war and natural disasters.

Yet we’ve never put in place a global system of pandemic preparedness.

The very word “pandemic” suggests to many people a catastrophe beyond our power to predict and protect ourselves from. Which is odd, given our success in largely eradicating smallpox, polio and malaria.

The next viral outbreak is probably just around the corner. In the past 25 years, the world has experienced four pandemics, and six epidemics with potential of becoming pandemics. Since 1980, the number of viral outbreaks per year has more than tripled.

There are about half a million known viruses with the potential to “spill over,” as scientists say, to humans from animals and insects; that’s the source of nearly all new viruses, including COVID-19.

COVID-19 has already killed more than 400,000 people on all six continents, including almost 8,000 people in Canada. It has been a disaster of unprecedented geographic scope. And it has brought the entire $117-trillion world economy to its knees, a historic first.

That’s reason enough, one would think, to demand a plan to protect against a deadly threat to which we have never been more vulnerable.

An ever-increasing portion of the world’s population lives in cities, the great incubators of infectious disease. And passenger air travel, the chief vector of transmission, consisted last year of more than four billion trips — a passenger volume expected to double by 2040, once current travel restrictions are lifted.

Speed of infectious-disease transmission has never been greater, and will continue to accelerate. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel laureate molecular biologist, has said: “The microbe that felled one child in a distant continent yesterday can reach yours today and

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seed a global pandemic tomorrow.”

Finally, the cost of not protecting ourselves from future pandemics would be astronomical.

The SARS outbreak of 2003 killed fewer than 800 people. But it also inflicted a staggering $72 billion in economic damage. Much of that was suffered by Toronto, a SARS hot spot whose tourism, convention and film-production sectors were brought to a standstill.

The economic wreckage from COVID-19 is still underway, of course. But it will be measured in the trillions of dollars.

A master plan to prepare for the next pandemic would be a megaproject, to be sure. But it would save lives, would be financially and technologically doable, and would generate significant economic spinoff benefits.

A master plan would have some of the following characteristics:

Global coalition. We need a new treaty organization that rapidly detects and protects against disease outbreaks worldwide. The model could be NATO, big enough to effectively fight outbreaks, nimble enough to do so quickly.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is supposed to do that job, of course. But the WHO has shown itself in the current pandemic to be too slow and too vulnerable to political pressure — in this case from China.

The new coalition of countries would have adequate stockpiles of medical supplies. And it would maintain a standing corps of medical workers.

The coalition would rapidly deploy personnel and supplies to any disease-outbreak site worldwide. It would do so in recognition that an outbreak anywhere is a threat everywhere.

An early step toward such a coalition was taken with the virtual global summit held last month to raise $11.3 billion to ramp up global preparedness for future epidemics and pandemics. (Ottawa has contributed $850 million to the new fund.)

Even with COVID-19 cases coming down in some countries, their continued rise elsewhere poses a continued threat to all of humanity. The virus has demonstrated its ability to work around even the most severe travel restrictions, and is bound to revisit the few jurisdictions like New Zealand that have defeated it, so it must be eradicated everywhere.

That’s why future outbreaks must be met with a global response. “To keep Canadians safe and restart our economy,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said, “we need to defeat the virus not just within our borders, but wherever it is found.”

Surveillance and rapid communication. The coalition would rely on a new disease-detection system of unprecedented accuracy and geographic breadth.

Elements of that new system are already in place. Using artificial intelligence and big data, Toronto-based software firm BlueDot was able to identify signs of the Wuhan, China outbreak last December, earlier than the WHO. The firm even accurately predicted 20 places to which the disease would next spread.

A significant missing piece, though, is communications. Disease-outbreak reports are first given to public-health officials, then governments, then the medical community, and finally the public and industry.

That information-cascade approach doesn’t work. It causes delayed reactions that claim lives. Canada is abysmal at medical-data collection and at sharing data among Canadian jurisdictions. Coalition members would get religion about rapid, widespread internal and external data collection and sharing.

Even those measures won’t be quite enough. Governments must start now in monitoring anti-vaccine groups (antivaxxers), and designing vaccination centres that are protected from anti-vaxxer attack.

Self-sufficiency. Canada and many other major economies are heavily reliant on imported medical supplies. Yet in a pandemic, it’s every country for itself in the frenzied competition to secure desperately needed supplies.

Coalition member countries would commit to becoming self-sufficient in pandemicfighting supplies. We needn’t repatriate every sector of medical-supply manufacturing. But it just makes sense to have home-country manufacturing and stockpiling of the most essential supplies.

That process, too, is already underway. Canadian manufacturers have retrofitted their operations to make everything from ventilators to medical gowns.

Relying on China for Etch-aSketch knockoffs is one thing. Relying on one or a few countries for urgently needed medical supplies is another — it is unacceptable.

Many Chinese medical supplies shipped to Canada have turned out to be faulty, and the U.S. threatened to ban shipments of American-made ventilators to Canada and other countries.

There are sizable spin-off benefits from better protecting ourselves from future pandemics. The new model of pandemic preparedness would bolster Canada’s prowess across several sectors. They include drug and diagnostics development, medical-equipment invention and manufacturing, advanced satellite imagery for detecting disease outbreaks, and highwage job creation in providing these supplies for ourselves and exporting them to others.

The new normal is that we are at risk of being held hostage to externalities beyond our control — to diseases of offshore origin, and diseasefighting supplies that must be imported.

The only remedy is to take greater control over our future health and welfare.

That quest can’t start soon enough.

Be well, and stay safe.