Five years ago, the world began to discover Covid-19, a few months before the pandemic forced the entire globe into lockdown. Five years and millions of deaths later, is the world better prepared to face a new pandemic if it were to arrive?
Five years after the arrival of Covid-19, which killed millions and devastated the global economy, the world, although better prepared, is far from being ready to face another pandemic, according to the WHO and experts.
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What the WHO thinks
Is the world better prepared? “The answer is yes, and no,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, an organization that has been at the heart of the battle against Covid-19, recently. “If the next pandemic occurred today, the world would still face some of the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities,” he said.
“But the world has also learned many painful lessons from the pandemic and taken important steps to strengthen its defenses,” he said.
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According to Maria Van Kerkhove, the American epidemiologist who heads the Department of Prevention and Preparedness for Epidemics and Pandemics at the WHO, “many things have improved thanks to the 2009 influenza pandemic (H1N1, Editor's note), but also thanks to Covid.” “But I think the world is not ready for another pandemic or mass epidemic,” she said.
“Not ready for a new pandemic”
The group of independent experts for pandemic preparedness and response, created by the WHO, says it bluntly: “In 2025, the world is not ready to fight a new pandemic threat”, due to the inequalities that persist in access to financing and tools to fight pandemics, such as vaccines.
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Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans explained to AFP that the success and speed of production of vaccines based on the messenger RNA (mRNA) technique could be a “game changer” during the next global health crisis. But she worries that their use in the face of a future threat will encounter “major problems” in particular because of the “staggering” level of disinformation.
And Tom Peacock, virologist at Imperial College London, considers that the possibility of an H5N1 avian flu pandemic must be taken “very seriously”. For the moment, the virus is not transmitted between humans but it circulates massively in many animal species.
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“I don’t think we are any more prepared than we were with Covid,” added Meg Schaeffer, epidemiologist at the American SAS institute, to AFP. She estimates it would take another four to five years for public health authorities to detect and share information more quickly. But she has “confidence” in the lessons learned by the population during Covid-19 to protect themselves, such as social distancing and wearing a mask.
Concrete and a warning signal
Inaugurated in 2021 in Berlin, the new WHO center on pandemic prevention is dedicated to collecting intelligence to better detect and mitigate threats. Born in 2022, the World Bank's Pandemic Fund has so far approved financing worth $885 million, allocated to nearly 50 projects covering 75 countries.
A technology transfer center for mRNA vaccines was inaugurated in South Africa in 2023 with the support in particular of the WHO, as well as in 2022 a global training center for biomanufacturing in South Korea to stimulate production local pharmaceutical company.
On January 30, 2020, the WHO declared that Covid-19 constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), its highest level of alert but with too bureaucratic sounds. And most countries and the general public only reacted when the head of the WHO first used the much more evocative term “pandemic” on March 11, 2020.
In order to trigger more effective international collaboration, WHO member countries have agreed on the concept of “pandemic emergency”, now the highest level of global alert.
A treaty?
In December 2021, WHO member countries decided to develop an agreement on pandemic prevention and preparedness to avoid serious Covid mistakes.
But major questions remain unanswered, including that of sharing data on emerging pathogens and the resulting benefits, namely vaccines, tests and treatments but also pandemic surveillance. The negotiators set May 2025 as the deadline to reach consensus.
In addition, more than 200 scientists from more than 50 countries evaluated data on 1,652 pathogens – mainly viruses – allowing the WHO to draw up this year a list of around 30 pathogens likely to cause future pandemics, such as Covid-19, Lassa fever and the Ebola, Zika and Marburg viruses.
