The Last Pandemic

Technological breakthroughs and policy progress mean humanity may never again have to endure a disaster like Covid-19.

- By Ronald Bailey

Microsoft founder Bill Gates cautioned in 2015. The next catastrophically deadly global event, he predicted, was “most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.”

In 2019, Johns Hopkins researchers issued an even more specific warning. In the article “Characteristics of Microbes Most Likely to Cause Pandemics and Global Catastrophes,” a team led by physician Amesh Adalja identified respiratory transmission as the “mechanism most likely to lead to pandemic spread.” They noted that “diseases that are contagious prior to symptom development” pose the greatest risk, especially if a significant proportion of the human population were “immunologically naïve to the agent,” and that the ability to latch onto common cellular receptors located throughout the human body would make such a pathogen highly infectious. Finally, they singled out RNA viruses emerging from an animal species as the “most probable” cause of such a pandemic.

In a September 2019 report, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank warned that “there is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5 percent of the world’s economy.” The authors added, “A global pandemic on that scale would be catastrophic, creating widespread havoc, instability and insecurity. The world is not prepared.”