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For the first time in history, we have an opportunity to stop the next pandemic.

From the earliest thinking of the Greek physician and philosopher Claudius Galen to the 19th-century British “father of epidemiology” John Snow to the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, recurring, widespread, and uncontrollable illness has been beyond the grasp of the most cutting-edge science. For most of our history, humans have experienced plagues and pandemics as acts of unknowable forces.

No longer. In recent decades, scientific and medical advances have made it possible to detect, treat, and stop the pathogens most likely to sweep across continents and cause widespread death. The question now is not whether we can prevent the next pandemic, but whether we will.

Inside this story

• Why another pandemic within the next few decades is likelier than you might think — and why all hope is not lost, despite the US retreat from global health leadership

• Where the next pandemic will likely come from

• The three-part playbook to extinguish pandemic threats, and how the world can collaborate to implement it

• The most urgent, low-hanging steps we can take to blunt pandemic risk from infectious diseases right now

On our current trajectory, we will likely be faced with another pandemic in our lifetimes. By 2050, humanity has a nearly 50 percent chance of facing a pandemic as severe as Covid-19, which killed an estimated 25 million people around the world, and a one in seven chance of a catastrophic pandemic killing 100 million people, according to an analysis published by the World Bank and The Lancet. These odds depend on both what’s called the “spark risk” of a new threat emerging, and the “spread risk” of that threat growing to pandemic scale. Both risks are increasing every year due to more contact between people and wild animals, the proliferation of labs handling high-risk pathogens, and increasing accessibility of biological weapons. So the 50-50 odds are optimistic. Nobody wants to relive the pain and chaos of the last pandemic, but biology doesn’t care.

As the US withdraws from collaborative global leadership, and conflicts simmer and spread around the world, the post-World War II order is under threat. But people around the world still believe that countries should work together, including on global health, as long as international cooperation actually solves tangible problems.

The America First Global Health Strategy, released in September by the Trump administration, includes detection and containment of biological threats as top priorities. In June, the UK announced a billion-pound investment in a new biosecurity center “to protect the British public and the economy from future pandemics.” The African Union has launched a new African Epidemic Fund to support countries in preparing for and responding to outbreaks, and East Asian countries have made political and financial investments to prepare for biological threats from outbreaks and adversaries. Even as countries cut global health funding, stopping the next pandemic is a problem the world wants to solve.

Technological breakthroughs and lessons learned from the Covid pandemic have created an unprecedented opportunity to prevent, detect, and snuff out new threats at the source. With the right leadership and smart investments, we can take the top pandemic threats off the table in the next 10 years.

Here’s how.

What will cause the next pandemic?

A couple hundred viruses are already circulating in humans, and hundreds of thousands more are circulating in animals. The risk of these viruses jumping from animals to humans, known as zoonotic transmission, is increasing as people move into areas that were previously inhabited only by animals. In the last 10 years, several of these so-called natural outbreaks, including Zika and bird flu, have had serious health and economic impacts.

For almost all of human history, pandemic threats emerged from........

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