The British economist Lord Nicholas Stern once remarked that climate change results from history’s greatest market failure—the failure to attach a price to the costs of CO2 emissions.23 If this is true, then as the coronavirus crisis of 2020 demonstrates, the failure to build adequate defenses against global pandemics must be a close second. Even the best-funded global public health infrastructure cannot offer guarantees, but as 2020 began, the disproportion between pandemic risk and the investment in global public health was nothing short of grotesque.
