The fiscal anatomy of the next pandemic

Pandemics become global catastrophes because health systems collapse under the weight of fiscal constraints

- Hasina Kathrada

The Global Council on Inequality, Aids and Pandemics has issued a warning that turns the usual pandemic logic on its head.

The next global health emergency, it argues, will not be triggered by a virus but by the economic conditions that allow disease to spread unchecked.

Debt, austerity and collapsing public budgets are becoming the true accelerants of future pandemics, leaving countries too fiscally suffocated to respond, even if science delivers the tools to intervene.

The findings were released in Johannesburg this week at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), where members of the council presented a two-year, evidence-heavy investigation into how inequality fuels pandemics and how pandemics, in turn, deepen inequality.

The launch brought together ministers, economists and activists from across the global South, signalling a shift in terrain.

Pandemic preparedness is no longer being discussed solely in hospitals and laboratories. It has entered treasuries, debt offices and credit-rating meetings.

What gives the warning added weight is timing. South Africa will chair the G20 leaders' summit in 2025 — the same G20 that controls 85% of global GDP and more than 90% of lending power.

The council's plea is blunt: if pandemic preparedness is not treated as a fiscal issue in the G20 agenda, the next outbreak will repeat the same cycle — science succeeds, but politics and finance fail.

Nobel Prizewinning economist, former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the architects of the post-2008 global financial reform agenda, Joseph Stiglitz, co-chairs the council. He said the starting point is no longer biological risk but political and economic choice.

"If governments enter the next pandemic already trapped in debt and austerity, you have lost before the virus arrives," he told the audience.