There Will Be Another Pandemic

 There will be another pandemic.

Well, in all likelihood there will be. After all, unless some other event happens to cause the extinction of humans soon (such as, I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia), the probability of another pandemic occurring ever approaches 1. However, that kind of logic is not what this blog post is about. I instead posit that there will be another pandemic SOON. Maybe in the next twenty years, certainly in this century.

Why? Because the conditions that led to this pandemic are still set to be in place in the “new normal”. Wet markets in East Asia, where Coronavirus is theorised to have developed, are still common, and the West has an awful lot of practices that are prime ground for the breeding of new superdiseases, such as an over-reliance on antibiotics, a refusal to wear face-masks even in the limited way that had become the norm in the rest of the world before the pandemic, abbatoirs, slaughterhouses, nightclubs, or even the fact that according to New York’s The Cut magazine 69% of American men do not wash their hands after using the toilet. In short, conditions still exist all over the world for new diseases to develop, and all of these new diseases risk a world-changing pandemic.

Furthermore, there is no appetite to change the political conditions that led to a difficult to contain virus in China becoming a global pandemic. Countries are still unwilling to share information with non-allies, even when information is about viruses so not exactly of important military value. The World Health Organisation still remains chronically underfunded and underpowered - and we can see this in their inability to drive policy decisions, both at national levels and an international level. For example, this morning a representative from the WHO was on the BBC begging the government to not remove all covid restrictions on 26th January, given how badly it risks affecting the UK if allowed to spread unchecked throughout February and March. A new pandemic of course can happen if this kind of intervention from the WHO is seen as insignificant rather than something on which a government risks its entire credibility.

Having said that, even if moving out of step from the WHO was a credibility risking issue, this government would be able to take such steps with impunity, due to not having any credibility left.

So is the world trapped in a forever-cycle of pandemics? Not exactly. After all, perhaps the biggest evidence that there will be another pandemic is also the biggest evidence that governments will eventually act properly - which is that it did not take one world war for the mechanisms to prevent world wars to be put in place, but two.

Also worth considering is that a new pandemic will not occur with Boris and Trump holding power simultaneously, so the UK and US response should be considerably better too. Indeed, Tony Blair, for all his faults, was extremely paranoid when it came to government emergency preparation, and genuine plans for exactly this sort of disease outbreak existed in government before the 2010s. Now that these emergencies are seen as genuine threats to the continuation of life as we know it, it could prove popular for a government to dust off and develop old plans again.