Improving pandemic governance
How can key decision-makers prepare for, and respond effectively during, future pandemics?
This profile is tailored towards students studying business, economics, health sciences, law, media and communications, political science, and sociology; however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Pandemic outbreaks have caused enormous loss of life. Global excess mortality due to COVID-19 was at least 17 million in 2020 and 2021, with more deaths continuing to this day. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed between 1% and 5.4% of the global population. Smaller influenza pandemics such as those in 1957 and 1968 killed 1-4 million people worldwide, and demonstrate that the emergence of new respiratory viruses is a routine event. Pandemics also harm the quality of people’s lives; for example, the COVID-19 global recession is the deepest since the end of WWII according to the Brookings Institute. The Institute for Progress has estimated that COVID-19 cost the USA between 7 and 16 trillion dollars worth of health and economic damage, over and above the value of lives lost.
We need technological improvements and improvements to governance and implementation to better respond to pandemics and other biological threats. Natural pandemics more severe than COVID-19, or anthropogenic pandemics caused by engineered pathogens, could cause huge disruption to global civilisation and humanity’s future, possibly even the collapse of critical infrastructure and global civilization. Governments and other key institutions are key to controlling pandemics, but many are still under-prepared – see the Global Health Security (GHS) Index to learn more.
There are many questions research could help explore, such as how to increase the capacity of health systems to respond to pandemic threats, protect critical infrastructure in a pandemic, improve supply chain resilience, amend laws to speed up emergency drug approvals and respond to misinformation. Cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses could also help identify the most promising interventions to prepare countries for responding to future pandemics.
In the talk below, Dr Crystal Watson from the Center for Health Security discusses the work the center has been doing to prevent and prepare for pandemics.
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Contributors: This profile was last updated 7/01/2023. Thanks to Richard Bruns for helping to write this profile and Jacob Arbeid, David Manheim, Elika Somani and Dewi Erwan for helpful feedback. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
