- Published
- 28 May 2026
- Author/s
- Professor Garrett Wallace Brown
A recent hantavirus headline followed a now-familiar script: ominous language, heavy emphasis on uncertainty, and the suggestion that "this is how the next pandemic starts."
The media dedicated numerous headlines to the outbreak, crowding out the war in Gaza, drone attacks in Ukraine and Russia, the ongoing war in the Straight of Hormuz, and countless other global catastrophes.
The fever pitch was so high that the World Health Organization (WHO) felt obliged to hold a press conference to say it was not the next pandemic. That the reassurance was necessary at all tells you something about where we are in terms of health securitisation and pandemic anxiety.
Understanding the actual risk
In essence, the framing that ‘this is how the next pandemic starts’ is misleading. Hantaviruses are not new. They have been studied for decades, with transmission typically limited to exposure to rodent excreta in specific environments rather than sustained human-to-human spread. These infections can be severe, even fatal. But they are not plausible global catastrophes.
And yet they are treated as if they might be. That gap between risk and representation is not accidental. It reflects a broader shift in how public health threats are understood and governed. And how they become securitized. A condition that started before Covid-19, but that has accelerated since. Increasingly, institutions respond not simply to risk, but to novelty. A pathogen does not need to be widespread or highly transmissible to command attention. It simply needs to be unfamiliar.
This is part and parcel of securitisation and the attention and resources it can command. Novel threats are where mandates expand, budgets are justified, and institutional relevance is reinforced. Meanwhile, diseases that impose far greater burdens, like tuberculosis, malaria, and seasonal respiratory infections, receive comparatively less urgency precisely because they are predictable and familiar.
Incentives and systemic imbalance
The incentives driving this imbalance are clear. Governments seek to demonstrate responsiveness to uncertain threats. International organisations seek relevance and funding. Philanthropic actors, including Bill Gates and others, have directed substantial resources toward pandemic preparedness and global health initiatives, shaping priorities along the way. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attach to the latest funding trends. While media outlets amplify risk to capture attention.
This pattern is not new, but it has recently accelerated. Emergency powers have arguably expanded beyond what the evidence warrants, dissenting scientific views are often marginalised, and funding structures rewarded institutional growth over public health outcomes. These are not the failings of individuals acting in bad faith. They were the predictable products of an architecture focused on novel outbreaks and the securitisation of health.
The result is a feedback loop in which the perception of danger can become decoupled from its actual magnitude. COVID-19 exposed real weaknesses in global preparedness. But it also exposed failures of judgment. Policies were often adopted with limited evidence and maintained longer than warranted. The problem was not simply that responses were too slow. It was that they were often poorly calibrated.
The pandemic agreement and the risk of overreaction
The WHO-led Pandemic Agreement risks embedding this distortion further. Its emphasis falls heavily on surveillance, early warning systems, and rapid response mechanisms tied to emerging pathogens. These are not misguided priorities; pandemics do happen and a level of preparedness is prudent. But they have become insufficiently balanced by principles of proportionality, comparative risk, and evidence-based restraint.
As a result, the Pandemic Agreement focuses overwhelmingly on accelerating response, faster detection, faster reporting, faster coordination, and faster action. It is based on the language of an imminent and ‘existential threat’ to humanity justifying unprecedented expenditure, hyper-vigilance and fear. In other words, it strengthens the capacity to act very quickly, but not the discipline to act wisely.
This is most evident in what the Agreement omits. There is extensive discussion of surveillance and coordination. There is far less emphasis on proportionality, general system and human resiliency, cost-benefit analysis, or the protection of civil liberties. These are not peripheral concerns. They determine whether public health interventions ultimately do more good than harm.
There is also a deeper structural risk. If every pathogen is treated as a potential pandemic until proven otherwise (think of the headlines regarding Mpox, Ebola, Hantavirus), then emergency becomes the baseline condition. Anxiety the norm. Preparedness becomes a standing justification for extraordinary expenditures and measures regardless of risk and scale of risk. Resources shift toward low-probability events at the expense of high-burden diseases. Opportunity costs build. And public trust erodes as policies appear inconsistent or excessive.
That erosion of trust matters. It weakens compliance in future crises, precisely when it is most needed. The hantavirus story provides a useful test. If a limited, well-understood zoonotic disease, isolated on a single boat, can generate disproportionate alarm grabbing headlines, military response, and primed anxieties, then what happens when the next ambiguous pathogen emerges? Under the Pandemic Agreement, the incentives will be to escalate early and broadly, to demonstrate responsiveness and avoid blame.
But escalation is not costless. It carries X, Y and Z consequences that can rival, and sometimes exceed, the threat itself. Preparedness matters, but so does restraint and reflection. Without it, the next global emergency may not be the pathogen. It may be the response we have pre-committed to.
Professor Garrett Wallace Brown is one of the course leaders on our fully-online Global Health MSc.