Stopping Pandemics Costs 95% Less Than Dealing With Them, Study Finds

New research reinforces the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” when it comes to preventing future pandemics.

With the world now entering its third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of 20 experts have released a “blueprint” for stopping animal-borne pathogens from spilling over into humans. The study, led by Harvard University researchers and published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, finds that implementing just three pandemic prevention strategies — halting deforestation, improving disease monitoring and surveillance, and better managing the wildlife trade — would cost a fraction of the annual economic and human losses that result from emerging infectious diseases.

Less than 5%, to be exact ― and that’s a conservative estimate.

Aaron Bernstein, the study’s lead author and director of Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, said during a call with reporters this week that given the world’s ongoing experience with COVID-19, it would be foolish not to invest in an alternative path that costs 5 cents on the dollar.

“Our salvation comes cheap,” he said.

Pathogens that spread from animals to humans are known as zoonotic diseases, and scientists warn that the threat of transmission is increasing as humans destroy ecosystems and exploit wildlife. The COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have started when the novel coronavirus leapt from bats to humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. The outbreak has so far killed more than 5.7 million people worldwide, including nearly 900,000 in the United States, and could cost the global economy $12.5 trillion through 2024.

For its study, the Harvard-led team reviewed mortality data for all emerging zoonotic diseases that killed at least 10 people dating back to the 1918 Spanish flu. It concludes that with today’s population, 3.3 million people are expected to die each year from virus outbreaks. This loss of life translates to between $350 billion to $21 trillion annually, depending on different monetary estimates for the value of an individual human life. On top of that, disease outbreaks cause an estimated $212 billion annually in direct economic losses, according to the study.

By comparison, advancing techniques to avert future outbreaks, which the report identifies as “primary pandemic prevention,” would cost an estimated $20 billion annually. And it wouldn’t take much for this kind of global investment to pay off.

“Even if we were to reduce the risk of a bad pandemic by 1%, these measures would be cost-effective,” Bernstein said. “These measures have to be very modestly effective to justify their value.”

The study makes a clear case for shifting resources from pandemic preparedness and response to early prevention. The authors argue that the world is going about fighting emerging zoonotic diseases all wrong, focusing on vaccines, testing and other post-outbreak actions while largely ignoring ways to stamp out the next pandemic before it starts.

“Prominent policymakers have promoted plans that argue the best ways to address future pandemic catastrophes should entail, ‘detecting and containing emerging zoonotic threats,’” the report states. “In other words, we should take actions only after humans get sick. We sharply disagree.”

Stuart Pimm, a study author and ecology professor at Duke University, said it is obvious that the tools for battling COVID-19 are far from perfect.

“Only 60% of Americans are vaccinated. We’re not getting vaccines anywhere near the numbers we need to to people in poor countries,” he said. “We need to start thinking about preventions. Those preventions are broadly things that we know how to do, and broadly things that we could implement quite quickly.”

Deforestation and other land-use changes are the single biggest driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks that have occurred since 1940, a 2015 study found. At the United Nations’ climate conference last year in Scotland, more than 100 nations, including Brazil, the U.S., Canada and Russia, signed an initiative to halt deforestation by the end of the decade. But a similar pact in 2014 did little to slow the razing of the world’s forests.

The new study notes that refocusing global pandemic efforts toward prevention would come with significant additional benefits, including preventing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, protecting water supplies and safeguarding biodiversity.

Bernstein argues that the world’s current approach for dealing with emerging zoonotic diseases would be akin to confronting climate change solely through adaptation, without any mitigation.

“If we were living on a planet with a stable climate and an intact biosphere, we might be able to afford waiting until disaster happens and trying to contain it,” he said. “But the reality is we don’t, and to operate on that premise is one of the greatest pieces of folly in modern times. To ignore the reality that the driver of disease emergence has to do with tumult in the living world and how we’re doing business with it, is really shocking in this day and age. And we simply cannot afford to take a post-spillover approach alone.”