Commonground
Senior Moderator
Blog
Every few weeks, a news article, grant proposal, or research paper warns that this virus, that bacterium, or some future zoonotic spillover of Disease X will ignite “the next pandemic” (Morens & Fauci, 2020; Simpson et al., 2020): Influenza, coronaviruses, Nipah, mpox, Ebola, hantaviruses—even the plague, smallpox, or a speculative engineered pathogen. Such warnings encourage vigilance, sustain research, and secure funding, but they also risk numbing and unsettling the public with the sense that pandemic calamity is always imminent.
But historically the globally catastrophic event that most concerns us has been (thankfully!) rare and exceptional. There were three major global disease emergencies in the past century—the 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 (Morens & Fauci, 2020). Between these major events, countless regional or limited outbreaks have flared and faded, but fail to meet the biological and social-behavioral criteria that allow a disease to scale globally, overwhelm healthcare systems, and kill and disrupt at scale. To understand what might truly come next, we must first clarify what a pandemic actually is—and what it is not.
- 25 September 2026
Every few weeks, a news article, grant proposal, or research paper warns that this virus, that bacterium, or some future zoonotic spillover of Disease X will ignite “the next pandemic” (Morens & Fauci, 2020; Simpson et al., 2020): Influenza, coronaviruses, Nipah, mpox, Ebola, hantaviruses—even the plague, smallpox, or a speculative engineered pathogen. Such warnings encourage vigilance, sustain research, and secure funding, but they also risk numbing and unsettling the public with the sense that pandemic calamity is always imminent.
But historically the globally catastrophic event that most concerns us has been (thankfully!) rare and exceptional. There were three major global disease emergencies in the past century—the 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 (Morens & Fauci, 2020). Between these major events, countless regional or limited outbreaks have flared and faded, but fail to meet the biological and social-behavioral criteria that allow a disease to scale globally, overwhelm healthcare systems, and kill and disrupt at scale. To understand what might truly come next, we must first clarify what a pandemic actually is—and what it is not.