World has already forgotten the lessons of COVID

In December 2019, as the world was looking ahead to a new year, a novel virus was quietly spreading in China, having most likely made the leap from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market. Soon, the COVID-19 pandemic would bring the world to a grinding halt, forcing billions of people into unprecedented lockdowns and shuttering economies worldwide. Five years on, we are still grappling with the effects of this so-called gray rhino — a high-probability risk that was nonetheless neglected or ignored.

What did we learn? For starters, the pandemic exposed fundamental flaws in the design of the global economy. In such a tightly interconnected world, the virus was able to spread globally in the space of just a few weeks. And governments, focused on short-term economic goals, were reluctant to do what was necessary to prevent or stop it. While the World Health Organization issued warnings, it lacked the resources or authority to take decisive action. As hospitalizations mounted, not a single healthcare system in the world proved to be a match for the virus.

Moreover, inequality — both between and within countries — fueled heightened social tensions during lockdowns, exacerbating class and gender struggles, but also conflict between the Global North and Global South. In the wake of the vaccine rollout, wealthier countries hoarded doses while billions of people in poorer countries had to wait months or even years for access.

This “vaccine nationalism” was a strategic as well as a moral failure. New variants of the virus soon emerged, prolonging the pandemic and undermining the global recovery. The pandemic also exposed, and fueled, a loss of trust in institutions as misinformation and disinformation campaigns led to disaffection with government pandemic responses. Commonsense measures like social distancing and masks soon became deeply divisive political issues.

The pandemic also lent urgency to questions that can seem remote to the quotidian functioning of the economy. Should we think of the economy as independent of its host society and can there even be a global economy without global institutions?

For a fleeting moment, it looked like COVID could be the wake-up call that would finally bring about greater economic solidarity. When the severity of the crisis became apparent, many governments did move relatively quickly to enforce lockdowns, protect vulnerable populations and roll out fiscal and monetary interventions on an unprecedented scale to prevent an economic freefall. It was the first time in living memory that policymakers started listening more closely to epidemiologists than economists, prioritizing people over profits.

For a fleeting moment, it looked like COVID could be the wake-up call that would finally bring about greater economic solidarity.

Antara Haldar

The virus illuminated the character of the “commons,” blurring the line between individual and shared interest. It posed a collective action problem that only a coordinated effort could address. Briefly, the widespread confrontation with death seemed to bring out a kinder, gentler side of society.

But a scientific breakthrough abruptly ended this moral state of exception. As the economic historian Adam Tooze argued, the messenger RNA vaccine allowed global capitalism to escape a reckoning once again. The pandemic clearly demonstrated that our current economic systems, with their myopic focus on short-term interests, are fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with what the ecologist and microbiologist Garrett Hardin called a “tragedy of the commons.” But this inherent fragility was soon papered over.

While the impetus for reform was lost, it is still obvious that we need international institutions that can align longer-term global interests with shorter-term incentives. The vaccines allowed COVID to be treated as an aberration, but we must not forget what it really was: a preview of the kind of planetary challenges that await us. In the face of climate change, uncontrolled artificial intelligence and other developments, cooperative cross-border solutions are not a starry-eyed indulgence but an existential necessity.

Since the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, we have largely gone back to business as usual, averting our gaze from the frailty of global supply chains that resulted in shortages of basic goods — the consequence of just-in-time manufacturing and overreliance on concentrated production hubs in the name of efficiency. Rather than reinventing our production networks to make them more resilient and decentralized, we are once again on a quest for the cheapest possible “world factory.”

The “essential” workers whom we briefly honored, clanging our pots and pans, remain a largely non-unionized precariat lacking the assurances of a strong social safety net. The inequalities that we decried have grown only worse, with Oxfam observing that the pandemic left 5 billion people poorer, while doubling the fortunes of the world’s five richest men.

Similarly, the outcry over racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd is now being dismissed as part of the “woke” agenda that US voters rejected at the ballot box in November. After two years of negotiations, the draft of a global pandemic treaty remains unsigned and the 7 million people killed directly by the virus have become mere statistics.

The sobering truth to remember for the new year is that threats like the climate crisis, unfettered AI and rising geopolitical tensions, not to mention public health risks like bird flu and mpox, are quietly gathering force — just as the virus was doing five years ago. There are only so many times that science will come to the rescue. When it doesn’t, will our institutions be able to protect us?

It is worth remembering that COVID-19 was a single gray rhino and it was enough to paralyze us. A herd of rhinos — the risk we face in 2025 — is called, fittingly, a crash.

• Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.
©Project Syndicate