The COVID-19 pandemic, as best as we can tell, took more than 20 million lives, cost $16 trillion, kept 1.6 billion children out of school, and pushed some 130 million people into poverty. And it’s not over: Figures from October 2024 showed at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of them in the United States, and that’s relying only on data from the 34 countries that still report deaths to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Last month, at a 4-day meeting here on preventing future pandemics, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove ticked off those figures with exasperation. “The world I live in right now, no one wants to talk about COVID-19,” she told the gathering. “Everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really happen.”
Despite the flood of insights into the behavior of the virus and how to prevent it from causing harm, many at the meeting worried the world has turned a blind eye to the lessons learned from the pandemic. “I feel this massive gravitational pull to go back to what we were doing before,” Van Kerkhove said. “There’s no way we should be going back.”
Even more concerning to some at the conference, many countries have actually become hostile toward pandemic prevention research, much of the anger stemming from an unproven assertion that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab.
“There’s been massive public and political backlash against the virology community and public health in general, so we may be worse off now locally than we were prior to the pandemic,” said virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was recently accused by Robert Redfield, former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of being the “scientific mastermind” of a supposed effort to engineer the virus.
