AJEM April 2020: Foreword

ABSTRACT

Health experts have, for many decades, urged governments to take the threat seriously and the H5N1, H1N1, SARS and MERS outbreaks in the years preceding the pandemic should have increased the sense of urgency. A long-term, well-funded global plan was needed to reduce pandemic risk. Instead government funding was incremental and short-lived, triggered by the earlier novel disease outbreaks and fading as the crises caused by them subsided.