The Political Challenges of Pandemic-Proofing
In September 2024, I started two new things. I started a new job in a UK Member of Parliament’s office. My first responsibility here was to read emails from people living in the area she represents, consider their opinions, and respond on her behalf.
At this time I also started an online course about pandemics. For 12 weeks I came together with other participants to consider how the risk of deadly diseases is changing with technological advancement, and what we might do in response. An unusual way to spend my time, I accept.
I was never under the pretence that this course would necessarily help me in my day job. But at the end of every Friday morning session, as I logged off from pandemics and opened up emails about potholes and public spending, the contrast hit me.
One moment, I was in a virtual classroom with people passionate about and committed to pandemic preparedness. Entrepreneurs interested in innovating personal protective equipment (PPE), healthcare officials designing novel pathogen surveillance systems, lab leaders considering top-tier biosafety procedures.
Then I’d cycle into work, entering a world with the power and connections to make the pandemic people’s ideas a national policy, project or priority. A world with all power and connections to make them happen - but none of the interest in doing so. It served me well to promptly forget our morning discussion, freeing up brain-space to reply to concerns about winter fuel, assisted dying and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Over these four months, these two worlds only crossed once. Someone wrote in about access to monkeypox vaccines, which is easy in some areas of the country and difficult in others. Thankfully, this will likely never reach pandemic levels. But still - cases in the summer were as high as they had been since the surprise 2022 outbreak in London, the man wanted protection, and found it unfair that he would have to travel elsewhere to get protection. He has a point.
Pandemic proofing is possible
From The Economist.
My headline takeaway from the online course was a heartening one. Amidst all the fallout from Covid-19, the finger pointing, the long and lingering after-effects across our societies, we are not consigned to this fate for human eternity. Before the course, I was worried about the potential for more and worse pandemics, that we may go through the traumatic experiences of lockdown times all over again in the all-too-near future. The wider dissemination of AI-enabled biological tools and desktop DNA synthesisers looked like bad news, putting the power of biological alchemy in more and more hands with more and more messy motives. Indeed, I still think this is cause for grave concern.
But the course set out a strategy and vision for a pandemic proof world. A world where Covid-19 or its nastier cousins never have to happen again.
First, the strategy goes, we prevent anyone from ever catching a new disease in the first place. We know a great deal of how new diseases jump from animals to humans, so we target interventions towards minimising this risk. We tighten safety and oversight procedures for laboratories handling dangerous biological material, to minimise accidental lab leaks. We invest in prevention of bioweapon development and release, buoyed by our improving abilities to attribute who is doing what in the evolving world of bioengineering.
For the pathogens which slip through, we move into phase two - identify the pathogen, detect all human cases, stop the pathogen from spreading further. If you’re reading this and lived in the UK in 2020, you might now be shaking your head in incredulity, the difficulty of actually doing this fresh in your mind. But, for example, with the right infrastructure for a pathogen early warning system, test-and-trace digital infrastructure ready from the start, and labs primed to rapidly scale sophisticated testing capacity, this prospect is far more viable.
Phase three should be avoidable, but exists to make sure that the harms of the pathogen-stroke-pandemic are minimised across the population. A huge difference can be made at this stage by picking and sticking by a strategy, having enough high quality masks to go around, timing calls for social distancing correctly and deploying consistent communications - the basics, you could say. New vaccine development within 100 days, close control of indoor air quality in public spaces, and antivirals which are more broadly effective are just some of the innovations we can look to, to believe that we really can live with the new disease within weeks and months, instead of years.
There’s even a gloriously compelling analogy to understand the potential of this vision - pandemic proofing as fireproofing. This analogy has become a key hook in my mind: fires were once habitual killers, now they’re not. Fire safety is baked into our infrastructure and our psyche. Why can’t we achieve the same for pathogens?
But this vision is exactly that: a vision, and not yet a plan nor a reality. I reel it off not to suggest it’s easy to implement (far from it), but to show it is possible and, following our general confusion during Covid, maybe surprisingly simple. It now needs broad acceptance, government-level efforts and enactment.
And so my mind drifts back to the day job…
Pandemic proofing is a political project
Politics is the battle for power in a world of limited resources.
Pandemic proofing is a hugely ambitious project.
Well-meaning health authorities around the world are no doubt already thinking about improving their pandemic preparedness, with renewed vigour, if not funding. Inquiries the world over are earnestly trying to learn the lessons from their respective responses to Covid-19. I’ll put aside the fact for now that inquiries, in the UK at least, tend to be more successful at creating political noise than lasting change.
I would bet, though, that very few are thinking or talking about pandemic proofing. Before my time in Parliament, I worked in the civil service, and if my experience was anything to go by, ambitious visions such as these come across as impressive but delusional, bereft of any of the practicality which makes public services tick.
If pandemic proofing is ever to happen, a project of persuasion must commence. We will first ask for time and attention from those in the world of public affairs and politics. We need to inspire a growing public consensus to support and reinforce this. Then we will need politicians, campaigners and everyone in between to put their political capital on the line to demand government action. Ultimately and most significantly, we will need government money on a serious scale.
To the policy wonk reader, technologist or entrepreneur - fear not, there will be work for you too. You will play an essential role in transforming the vision into a set of coherent and costed plans, grounding the vision in concrete work and outcomes, with which advocates can capture imaginations. A big project needs careful planning and meticulous delivery, ideally undistracted by the whims of campaigns, politics and power.
But my point is this is not and should not be a solely technocratic project. At its heart, a project of this magnitude and ambition demands that time, money and attention currently spent elsewhere are diverted here instead. In this way alone, pandemic proofing is a political project.
The political challenges of pandemic proofing
Please allow me some dodgy metaphors.
Success in public policy, says Australian political strategist Dennis Grube, is a matter of getting your ducks in a row. There are four of these ‘ducks’, to be precise. An evidence base and effective implementation are two of these ducks, and will probably feel like familiar territory to most readers. But they also need the other two ducks to be swimming in the same direction for success - how the problem is widely defined, and the narrative which motivates action. These form the core of the political project I focus on here.
In my eyes we desperately need success in our pandemic proofing project. Our withering in the face of the novel coronavirus and the aforementioned AI integration with biotechnology deepen the imperative. I fear, though, that severe political challenges stand in between us and success. This piece spawned from a niggling feeling that we don’t yet understand the more political ducks of the pandemic proofing project. We do not understand them at our peril.
What remains of this piece is my first attempt to define the political challenges of pandemic proofing. In brief, I describe them as:
- Inherent apathy - this is a hard issue to make most people care about, and as such campaigns about it offer little political reward.
- Excessive technocracy - evidence-based policy-making is really not in vogue at the moment, and I have not yet seen a version of pandemic proofing which speaks to widely held values, identities or emotions.
- Nobody is doing the work - the solutions of pandemic proofing naturally draw in scientists and technologists, who, acting alone, are unlikely to start telling the stories which motivate action.
I don’t claim this is a comprehensive account of pandemic proofing’s political challenges. My ideas need refinement, the breakdown I suggest is probably wrong, and there are undoubtedly things that I’m missing. My general leaning towards progressive politics will have coloured how I see things, just as your political persuasion will colour how you receive it. But I hope this offers a start, and encourages you to consider the extent and nature of the political challenges at play here.
Note, I am not talking about the politics of pandemic proofing once a new pandemic-potential pathogen is identified and spreading. These ‘wartime’ politics are beasts unto themselves and, I feel, less relevant to the project of pandemic proofing. This project and the next pandemic will mostly be won or lost in ‘peacetime’, not ‘wartime’. So it seems most important to consider the ‘peacetime’ political dynamic.
I also write mostly from a UK perspective, though I imagine the challenges raised here are relevant in other Western liberal democracies. I assume that national politics are the most relevant scale to consider and the building blocks to international efforts on pandemic proofing. That said, the major international coordination needed for true global pandemic proofing would have big political obstacles of its own to overcome.
- Inherent apathy
Google searches in the UK involving the term “pandemic” over the past five years, normalised to a 100-point scale.
Of course, my experience working in Parliament would have been quite different in 2020. Voters would have been writing in about the pandemic in their masses. The everyday experience of living in a pandemic was difficult to ignore. And the opinions, arguments and politics of how we should navigate such an unusual experience shouted even louder.
The waves of disease came and went; memories of lockdowns, masks and vaccines have gradually faded for most. The occasional spike of cases, vaccine drive or public inquiry remind us momentarily of that time. But such is the resumed normality of life for so many now that our attention doesn’t linger here for long. We’re in peacetime now, why remember the war?
It would make sense if we don’t want to think about it. It dominated our lives and conversations for far longer than we’d like to consider. Various commentators have noted this: “most of us would rather think about anything else than the pandemic”, says Matthew Rendall. “Covid-19 was so painful and so exhausting that we can’t even think clearly about the possibility it might happen again”, from Kelsey Piper.
It was an unwelcome topic then, as it is now. But now we can afford to forget it, think about nicer things, and/or move on to the problems of the world we find in Covid’s wake.
Besides, without a pandemic being in daily headlines, the very concept of a worldwide disease event is probably not something we’re well calibrated to reason about. To borrow Daniel Gilbert’s take on the psychology of climate change, the characteristics of the pandemic threat are not those which make our brains feel PAIN.
By PAIN, he means our brains are evolved to react to threats which feel Personal, Abrupt, Immoral and happening Now. An active pandemic can mean these things for you or I, but otherwise it’s an abstract concept. The threat of a theoretical pandemic tends to lack personal agency, unlike terrorism. It does not spark the moral outrage of, say, theft. It certainly does not have the immediacy of spotting a predator in the undergrowth.
Why too would we care about something so rare? A small body of academic work focuses on our “misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks”, a category into which a bad pandemic squarely falls. This is a distinct type of problem, coined ’the tragedy of the uncommons’.
Tragedies of the uncommons regularly fall foul of similar issues in public opinions, precisely because they are uncommon. They do not pop into mind - factually, visually, emotionally - with the same ease as those more visible, visual, relevant and recent to us, such as a plane crash or murder. Their potential for millions or billions of casualties do not elicit a level of concern anywhere near that of a small number of identified victims or villains. Talk of their severe impacts might leave us feeling that such an event would literally be too much for us to handle: in the worst pandemic scenarios we might call to mind, we wouldn’t have enough healthy people left to work out guilty parties, no legal system left to provide retribution, and certainly not enough insurance pay-outs to go around. So why bother trying? We can’t prepare for literally everything that might go wrong, the argument might go.
You might see these dynamics in most conversations which try to assess different risks, with a seriously bad pandemic amongst them. If you can get the conversation to that serious stage. It’s hard to talk realistically about a bad pandemic without coming across as apocalyptic. And warnings of apocalyptic catastrophes often seem, and genuinely are, absurd.
These are all different ways of expressing the same idea - we don’t think about pandemics when we don’t have to. Whether this is rooted in not recognising the threat, not caring to recognise it, or simply having too many other threats to think about is probably significant for guiding how we remedy this. For our purposes, I think it suffices to say that here we have political challenge number one: inherent apathy about the threat of pandemics.
Take it from someone who has knocked on many doors of many homes in the past year for political purposes: the hardest conversations to hold down are those where the other party simply doesn’t care about what you’re talking about.
Sure, we don’t need everyone to care about the pandemic threat. We may not even need a majority of people to care. But politicians are strongly incentivised to follow public opinion. For most politicians, their best chance of staying in their job will often look like visibly caring about the same things that voters care about. At the moment, I don’t think there’s even a vocal minority in favour of pandemic proofing competing for their attention. Even if the idea of pandemic proofing appeals to them, I’d bet that they’d forget about it as soon as the next issue with more political punch emerges. In this way, I see inherent apathy as a major, though not insurmountable, obstacle to pandemic proofing.
As I’ve said, it is the long periods of “peacetime” when the next pandemic is won or lost. It’s when we develop vaccines for every viral family, it’s when we learn how to use data about casualties from a few weeks ago to understand what might be happening right now, it’s when we build our state of the art wastewater monitoring system. It is also precisely in these periods that pandemics lose most public and political salience.
So here lies the tragedy. We risk losing the battle for pandemic proofing before it’s even begun; we risk losing it to apathy.
- Excessive technocracy
I hope we’re a while away from this.
Now for a short story - it’s about the World Health Organisation’s negotiations to create an international ’pandemic accord’, so bear with me.
At the negotiating table, countries have been grappling with a world-first opportunity: reaching a global agreement on principles, priorities and targets for pandemic preparedness and response. The accord’s significance would lie in what governments agree on as the key lessons to be learnt from Covid-19, and in the extent of their political commitment to do better next time.
Back in the UK’s Parliament again, the accord has not gone unnoticed. And it is here that I see the next political pandemic proofing challenge emerge.
In May 2022, months after the idea of the accord became public, a petition appeared on the UK Parliament website. “Do not sign any WHO Pandemic Treaty unless it is approved via public referendum”. Within three days it received over 10,000 signatures, enough to warrant an official government response. Within two weeks it obtained over 100,000 signatures, enough for the topic to be given debate time on the floor of Parliament. It hit 150,000 signatures before its first month was up.
The initial petition’s premise is reasonable. Petitioners worried about granting an unelected international health body authority, which has unfortunately accrued a recent track record of mistakes and scandals, over national public health decisions. People tend to care about sovereignty and democracy. Indeed, in the parliamentary debate which the petition brought about, and subsequent debates, the UK Government may have dismissed the appropriateness of a public referendum in this case, but they have been at pains to emphasise that the UK will never sign an accord which gives up our sovereignty.
My focus here is the UK, but I stumbled upon equivalents from Australia and Canada in my research, and similar debate in other countries too.
In a way, I’m surprised. We’ve just walked through why people don’t care about pandemics. And yet, another petition later called for the UK to end its membership of the WHO altogether. Again signatories exceeded 100,000. Another one asked Parliament to debate (and reject) proposed amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations. Another 100,000+. Analysis from 2015-17 showed that only 0.6% petitions reach the 100k mark, so this is a pretty impressive showing.
So impressive, I’d say, that some organising must be afoot. Beyond the reasonable facade of the petitions, there were less reasonable stories and statements. Rumours circulated that the WHO sought powers to impose international lockdowns, force national health spending, and declare pandemics on a whim. More conspiratorial rumours had the WHO acting on some sinister agenda to reset the world order, a vessel for billionaire philanthropists, big pharma or the country you don’t like, to finally do that nefarious thing they’ve been trying to do for ages now.
I have not definitively traced who said what and when in relation to these petitions, and who might be organising and funding such efforts to discredit the WHO (this would be interesting work). Nonetheless, I imagine you’re spotting the same type of narrative that has defined much of Western politics over the past decade, with great success. It’s sceptical of ‘elites’, experts, and globalism; it values control and self-determination.
Here lies the challenge for pandemic proofing, a project which relies on scientific advice, trust in public health institutions (like the WHO), and a recognition that pathogens operate without respect for borders. In the absence of better storytelling and meaning-making, it comes across as the kind of effort which is so not in vogue right now. There may be better ways of putting this, but I fear pandemic proofing is excessively technocratic for the taste of many people today.
As such, it will face resistance. In 2024, Action on World Health was formed, fronted by Nigel Farage. For non-UK readers, this man “masterminded” Brexit, is currently the most popular politician in the UK, and amongst the least popular. He gets reactions, so what he says gets noticed. And what he and Action on World Health are saying is that the WHO needs reforming or replacing. Familiar slogans prop up the mission: “Take Back Control”, “Restore Freedoms”, “Stop the Pandemic Treaty”. Naturally, they see great hope in President Trump’s election, and the possibility that he will waste no time in withdrawing the US from the WHO.
I confess I’m not well versed in the institutional strengths and weaknesses of the WHO, so I make no comment on the validity of this campaign. A campaign with soundbites like “no more lockdowns” could be offering us a vision of a pandemic proof world. Maybe this is the vehicle from which a better, more trusted global health institution can emerge, ready to invest in the central programmes which increase our global resilience to novel pathogens.
The point, however, is that this campaign has the hallmarks of one which cuts through and sets the agenda in this day and age. If we perceive pandemic proofing as (in part) a political project, its current branding and vibe do not have such hallmarks. Without someone fighting the political case for pandemic proofing, well-meaning efforts feel vulnerable to powerful backlash with powerful traction.
Interlude: the death of deliverism
In light of what we see here, I foresee a temptation for us. Double down on explaining the benefits of pandemic proofing. Frame them economically perhaps: put rapid vaccine development in the national industrial strategy, boast that thousands of jobs will be created for local people. People love jobs. Or maybe, more squarely, just focus on public health - we are investing in innovative wastewater monitoring to make sure we keep you healthy when new threats unexpectedly arise. Narratives such as these tempt me, and are not doomed to fail.
But I don’t have confidence that they actually cut through, if and when push comes to shove. My cause for pessimism lies in a concept which has been doing the rounds in progressive policy circles lately: the death of “deliverism”.
Deliverism, so the argument goes, is a doctrine onto which many political circles grip. Deliver policy which improves people’s lives, and a government will find itself rewarded on election day. It is a, if not the alternative to populism which is currently rampant around the globe; the antidote to the rising wave of authoritarianism. People are unhappy, but if we improve their lives, they will take note.
In some senses, deliverism is a fancy way of saying we assume humans are rational actors motivated by their immediate material interests. Put that way, if you’ve consumed any popular psychology content in recent times, the idea that deliverism is ‘dead’ should therefore come as no surprise. The authors of this compelling argument look particularly towards the failure of President Biden’s economic policies to win over voters from President Trump’s MAGA narratives. The hope for deliverism remains strong, but doesn’t find support in evidence.
It is vital, of course, that policymaking holds onto the material. But if you believe that deliverism is dead, you must now commit to the emotional too. This means relating pandemic proofing to deep human values, such as safety or dignity, alongside the policy detail.
It might mean creating and sustaining a social identity around pandemic proofing, or activating an existing identity which would support and build the cause. Speak to Brits proud of their National Health Service, who clapped key workers through the dark times and now want that to never happen again. Speak to grown-up children of aging parents, who will increasingly rely on public health services. Speak to Covid-19 survivors, to the bereaved Covid-19 families. The identity which any given person calls to mind when they hear “pandemic proofing” is there for the taking.
It might mean relating pandemic proofing to a vision of the good life which makes sense to many people’s everyday. It might mean telling stories, making heroes of some and - perhaps uncomfortably but importantly - tangible villains of others. It might mean building a movement which people feel they belong to and can look to in order to find meaning in their pandemic proofing activities.
It means taking people at their word for the problems of their life, not telling them what they should instead care about. If we believe this, and that people inherently don’t care about the pandemic threat, this is certainly a difficult crux for the political project of pandemic proofing. Perhaps it means the political project doesn’t talk about pandemics at all, and searches for other causes to which can attach pandemic proofing policies.
I mention this to give a flavour of how I think Action on World Health, for example, has overcome the apathy around pandemics, and what it might take to build a successful campaign around pandemic proofing in our current political landscape. It also prompts me to think about who devises and delivers these stories; who people look to for meaning in a fast-changing world; who people trust.
- Nobody doing the political work
David Attenborough is amongst the most trusted messengers on climate change in Britain. Who has pandemic proofing got?
This challenge builds on previous sections to such an extent that I won’t labour the point. It is not as inherent or difficult as meeting people where they are on an issue they may not think much about. In fact, this challenge is more a reflection of where we’re at with the political project of pandemic proofing. In a way, it’s my first and greatest call to action.
While writing this piece, I’ve tried to hang on to some sense of the material - it’s easy to get lost in the psychological and political, and forget that pandemic proofing means something very physical too. The interventions which move the dial towards that safer world originate in biotechnology, engineering and hard-nosed policymaking.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you may be one of those biotechnologists, engineers or hard-nosed policymakers. Don’t stop what you’re doing.
But if you make up the sum of work on this, then we should be worried. Scientists thankfully benefit from strong public trust in general, even more so in the wake of Covid-19. But they tend not to be the enigmatic promoters and defenders of an ambitious political project. They tend not to tell the stories which win over a support base to a new cause, or sustain a support base when a project hits difficulty. They tend not to ascribe meaning to events in a way that captures audience hearts and minds.
Who, then, is advocating for pandemic proofing on a political stage? Who is recruiting these advocates? Where are the campaign groups demanding your, my and everyone’s attention? Who is working out what messages these groups should be spreading? Who is doing the hard graft of political organising?
Given my understanding of who currently works in this field, which is admittedly piecemeal, I see technocrats. Despite my current work, I am inclined towards technocracy too. I think we will be overly tempted to deny the politics in pandemic proofing, or try to get by without them, or think scornfully of politicisation - all for valid reasons.
But, if I can call pandemic proofing a movement, the movement’s continued neglect of political messaging leaves us wide open to the whims of public opinion. Or, more accurately, the whims of those who probably don’t have the same good intentions as you.
If this turns into a fight, we don’t have fighters. Nor commanders, weapons, funding.
Recall the tragedy of the uncommons. It’s theoretical, but the author of this paper theorises that a tragedy of the uncommons, like a bad pandemic, will attract more expert concern than public concern. I think we see this phenomenon here. Political work can give the experts breathing space to deliver the project, or make sure that public concern is sufficiently high that experts have all the mandate they need, or both. This work needs people, people we don’t currently have.
What now?
I cycle past this fire station most days, I enjoy it every time I see it. Can we make pandemic fighters as loved as firefighters?
In a sentence, the political challenges for pandemic proofing lie in psychology, political trends, and people. The project of pandemic proofing isn’t something that people think about. If they do, there’s nothing and no-one to vibe with.
There are good grounds to disagree with most of what I’ve said here. I’ve gone back and forth multiple times on most points, and should be careful to not overstate my political nous (I’m about six months deep into working directly in politics).
One source of doubt was a 2023 YouGov and Rhodes House poll that found over half of the UK public are concerned that British politicians aren’t doing enough to prepare for the next pandemic. Over three-quarters (77%) say they think governments around the world should be investing more in their own healthcare system’s ability to respond to a future pandemic. This is a strong cause for hope.
To me, it also suggests where we might go next from here.
Let’s say you’ve read this, and you share my intuition that there is a political challenge here. You think we should be doing more to address the inherent and current challenges that pandemic proofing faces. You might even be ready to drop everything and help towards challenge number three.
I think the YouGov poll represents about as much as we understand about opinion on pandemic preparedness at the moment, in the UK at least. Common sense wisdom says that general support for an outcome (“more pandemic preparedness”) does not automatically translate to the interventions which achieve that outcome.
There are layers and layers of nuance beneath this I’d suggest we now explore. In particular, which pandemic proofing interventions might need political work, and which are genuinely apolitical and uncontroversial? On those more likely to capture political attention, where do we find different public and elite opinions now? Which messages have the greatest ability to change those opinions? Is this something where proactive work is actually valuable, or is reactive work all that counts?
For now, for me, it’s back to emails in the office. I wonder when I will receive the first email from a member of the public, calling for pandemic proofing our nation and the world. I wonder when a politician and their team might first sit together to discuss the prospect. Truthfully, if my boss asked me tomorrow whether we should start work on a campaign for pandemic proofing, what that campaign should say and who it should talk to, I wouldn’t be able to answer with any confidence, nor say which risks or opportunities they should be most aware of. This might be the problem in a nutshell.