Foreign Policy: The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly
Lisa Monaco, senior fellow at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security and Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Vin Gupta, assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, fellow at the Center for Global Development, and physician and officer in the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps

“…The prevailing laissez-faire attitude toward funding pandemic preparedness within President Donald Trump’s White House is creating new vulnerabilities in the health infrastructure of the United States and leaving the world with critical gaps to contend with when the next global outbreak of infectious disease hits. … Global health security should not be seen solely as the pursuit of development do-gooders or international policy wonks. Rather, the clear lessons of Ebola and prior pandemics for the current U.S. administration should be that fighting disease outbreaks requires the sort of consensus-building and galvanization of global resources that last week’s U.N. General Assembly was meant to celebrate and sustain. Cynical critiques of such cooperation ignore the mutual interdependence of our global community, which can’t be overturned by a speech or temporary set of inward-looking policy platforms. Pandemic preparedness is a matter of national security and needs to be treated that way. The greater the complacency, the bigger the next crisis will be” (9/28).