This week marks five years since the UK’s first Covid lockdown, and the lurching sense of unreality that came along with it has already been all but forgotten in our folk memory. For a time, it was illegal to leave our home without a good reason – an unimaginable upheaval in a free society, which we accepted as the cost of keeping people alive.
The Covid pandemic, at least in its early days, was the stuff of movies. A terrifying new disease of unknown origin sweeping the world, scientists in a mad dash for a cure, and society facing the challenge of pulling together to survive. But the filmic quality of the disaster didn’t last.
Movies are characterised by change – our characters change, grow, learn, and are different people by the time the credits roll. In reality, our society is notable more by how little it has changed than by how much. In many ways, that is to the good: contrary to the warnings of some of the more paranoid lockdown sceptics, our freedoms have returned intact and life, for those who survived healthily, is back to “normal”.
What is almost unimaginable is how little we have learned from what happened – as a country or as a world. Perhaps nowhere is that grimmer than in this simple and stark fact: as a planet, we are horribly less prepared for a pandemic today than we were five years ago.
And let’s be honest, it’s not as if our handling of the first pandemic was a triumph. The UK had been ranked one of the most prepared – if not the most prepared – countries in the world for a pandemic, and when those plans came into contact with reality, they crumbled. Most assumed the illness would be a flu, and basic adaptations to reality – on issues like masks, airborne transmission and more, took far too long.
But global health infrastructure was caught off guard too, having very few mechanisms to deal with China’s instinct to cover up bad news, meaning any opportunity to definitively settle the origins of Covid-19 are probably lost. A lab leak is possible, but so is the initially dominant theory of zoonotic transmission. Anyone who tells you with certainty it’s one or the other is overconfident.
In our collective defence, we had gone generations without a novel pandemic – HIV in the 1980s and Spanish Flu in the 1920s were the major predecessors. But now we are alert to the huge impact and risks they pose, you would hope we had collectively made sure we wouldn’t be caught off guard again. The reality is the opposite.
There is no way to talk about pandemic preparedness without talking about the USA, so let’s start there. The US, at least until recently, funded more medical research than any other nation, and has been the biggest player in global health.
Donald Trump’s first administration was hardly triumphant during the first pandemic – Trump himself was obviously out of his depth, vacillated on lockdown and restrictions, suggested people inject bleach, and more – but those around him largely handled the situation professionally. The chances of his second administration managing even a repeat of that mediocre performance are virtually nil.
For one thing, Trump’s secretary of health and human services is now Robert F Kennedy Jr, a longtime crank in general and – despite his dancing around the issue during his confirmation – a vaccine sceptic.
Kennedy is trying to handle the USA’s worst outbreak of measles – a disease four to six times as infectious as Covid among the unvaccinated – in decades. But instead of focusing attention on the extremely effective vaccine that exists for a disease that can kill children and wipe out the immune system of those who survive it, he is lamely suggesting diet and general health might be behind it. When the parents of the first child to die from measles in a generation gave a TV interview, they were supported by an anti-vaccine group that RFK Jr himself used to lead.
All of that is ominous enough, but is unlikely to be close to the biggest threat posed to public safety by RFK Jr, who suggested that infectious disease research would be a low priority for him, despite a pandemic so close in the rear-view mirror.
The USA is also battling a huge outbreak of bird flu ripping across the nation, although the Trump administration has stopped routinely releasing statistics on it. Bird flu is one of the highest-risk zoonotic diseases on the radar of public health professionals: we know it can mutate in ways that pose a threat to human life.
Despite this, RFK Jr is publicly floating the idea of eliminating culls for affected poultry in the hope that immunity emerges – essentially turning the USA’s entire poultry industry into a petri dish for uncontrolled mutation of the disease.
All of this would be catastrophic enough even if it were all that was going on, but it isn’t even close. The chaotic and illegal defunding of the federal government by Trump and Elon Musk is hitting fundamental research hard.
Even among the mass defunding of research projects, there are fears that mRNA vaccines – the nearest we came to a silver bullet in making Covid manageable – are being targeted. A study for an mRNA vaccine that appeared effective against pancreatic cancer is among those currently zeroed out.
The practical global infrastructure intended to buttress against global health emergencies is similarly devastated. The Trump administration is in the process of trying to shut down USAID, which was one of the biggest and most significant providers of frontline global health services across the world.
You might hope the World Health Organization could pick up the slack, but it is facing a funding crisis of its own – as the US provided more than a fifth of its funding and has abruptly withdrawn that, too. The UK, another major provider of global health funding, is also drastically cutting its overseas aid budget, in the cause of avoiding mild political discomfort for Keir Starmer.
Early detection, research and treatment offer the best chance of preventing pandemics before they can take hold. Funding for all three is being cut back – even as mystery diseases emerge sporadically across the world (most recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Even our attitudes as a public seem to have worsened over the five years since the beginning of the Covid outbreak. The UK has among the highest rates of vaccine acceptance in the world, but even here, around 13% of people are either vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax. In Canada, the same figure is 22%, while in the US it is 30%. Vaccine hesitancy is increasing in countries across the world. And if a new pandemic required lockdowns or similar restrictions, it is far less clear that enough people would comply with them to make them effective.
Covid was an awful disease: it infected 800 million people worldwide, killing seven million and leaving 22 million with long-term illnesses or disabilities – and those figures are almost certainly undercounted. But in many ways, it was one of the best versions of a pandemic we could hope for.
Its fatality rate settled at around 1%, and unlike the Spanish Flu – which was far deadlier in young and healthy populations than older adults – it affected the elderly most severely. It was more contagious than flu, but not radically so. It was not an especially difficult condition for which to develop a vaccine. The next pandemic might not be so kind.
Covid was a chance to see how devastating a pandemic could be to our economy, to our society and to ourselves – and a chance to adapt and prepare.
Closing the door after the horse has bolted is a well-worn cliche, but the extent to which we have, as a species, failed to take even the most basic lessons from the last pandemic should alarm us all.
Pandemics aren’t like climate change: we’ve all just experienced the full effects of one, and almost no country on Earth was left untouched. It is not something distantly in the future, but rather in our near past. And we cannot coordinate ourselves on even the most basic acts of preparedness for another pandemic. If we cannot get our act together as a species on this, there is virtually zero hope that we can manage it on anything else.
There are some small rays of sunshine through the gloom, but they are paltry. The UK is trying to learn lessons from its mistakes – the Covid inquiry is ongoing, and there is a major pandemic preparedness drill planned for August. But it is small beer.
The simple fact is that if we had been asked to imagine what the world might look like in five years’ time as we faced the first lockdown, optimists might have imagined a socialist utopia built on our newfound solidarity. Pessimists might have imagined a society that had collapsed under the strain of mass illness and death.
But surely no one imagined that we might recover almost intact from Covid, only to find ourselves less able and less ready to tackle the next emergency. Shame on us all.
