Gates Package — page 923

7. We can do better next time--if we start taking pandemic preparation seriously. The world responded to COVID faster and more effectively than to any other disease in history. But as the late educator and physician Hans Rosling put it, "Things can be better and bad."10 In the Better column, for example, I'd put the fact that the world developed safe, effective vaccines in record time. In the Bad column, I'd put the fact that too few people in poor countries are getting them. I'll return to this problem in Chapter 8. Another entry in the Bad column: the world's failure to get serious about preparing for and trying to prevent pandemics. Governments are responsible for the safety of their people. For common events that cause damage and deaths--fires, natural disasters, wars--governments have a structure for their response: They have experts who understand the risks, get the resources and tools they need, and practice how they'll respond in an emergency. Militaries run large-scale drills to make sure they're prepared for action. Airports run exercises to see if they're ready for an emergency. City, state, and federal governments practice responding to natural disasters. Even schoolchildren go through fire drills. When it comes to pandemics, though, virtually none of this happens. Although people had been raising the alarm for decades about novel diseases that could kill millions of people--a long succession of warnings came before and after mine in 2015--the world didn't respond. For all the effort that humans put into preparing for attacks from fires, storms, and other humans, we had not prepared seriously for an attack by the smallest possible enemy: a pathogen.