Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs

by Mark Olshaker

When everyone is involved in a pandemic, no one has extra help or supplies or food or medicine to send around, unless there was sufficient planning. There is a naïve belief that the kinds of supplies we need to respond to a pandemic, such as medical products, drugs, vaccines, and N95 respirators—commonly known as face masks—will be a click away on the Internet. Not so. Today, we live in a just-in-time-delivery economy where virtually nothing is warehoused for future sales, let alone stockpiled for a crisis situation. Not even the parts and components necessary to manufacture these critical supplies are warehoused or stockpiled. When a rolling global pandemic takes its toll on the working population of a city in Asia, for example, the products and supplies that come from that city—and perhaps nowhere else—that we need to respond to a rapidly growing pandemic will not be available. No amount of money can buy something that doesn’t exist. This is why the recently created World Bank Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility fund, which is intended to provide global financing for responding to a pandemic, will not work for a global emergency.