We need a global health system to deal with pandemics

Article originally published by Democracy Without Borders

Pandemic preparedness is a global public good

The key issue is that health systems are currently in the domain of national governments. Yet, as becomes clear when we consider measures to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, this means that there is a sovereignty problem because pandemic preparedness represents a global public good and aspects of its response need to happen transnationally. Examples of activities that arguably need to happen at the global level include the development of global guidelines and norms, research and development into vaccines and treatment, outbreak surveillance and early warning systems, and the management of disease transmission across borders. All these activities ideally also need to be funded and managed at the global level. 

In practice, however, it has been reported that these types of activities are underfunded, and although international financing for such activities increased somewhat after the Ebola outbreak, this increase was not sustained. There is an underinvestment in these areas because these are public goods, which suffer from what we call in economics the ‘free rider’ problem: people can benefit without paying. For example, they can benefit from outbreak containment activities carried out by one country, without supporting the cost of that containment . . .