From Detection to Decision-Making: Understanding Pandemic Risk

"Before the Outbreak," Episode 3

Apr 09, 2026

Scientists Studying Pathogens — StockCake: https://stockcake.com/i/scientists-studying-pathogens_420256_548243

Pandemic Risk Assessment is an emerging scientific toolkit designed to assess how pandemic risk is evolving over time. Rather than predicting the next outbreak, it integrates evidence across scientific disciplines to identify the drivers and estimate the probabilities of pandemic outbreaks. And in so doing, it can help policymakers prioritize prevention and preparedness investments before crises emerge.

Pandemic Risk Assessment is still an emerging field, but there is growing momentum to institutionalize it, with discussions exploring a range of possible models, including options inspired by bodies such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the UN-backed scientific body that regularly updates policymakers on the latest findings on climate change. Joining me to discuss why pandemic risk assessment is needed, what a robust scientific process might look like, and how to make it a permanent feature of our global pandemic preparedness landscape are Serina Ng and Ben Oppenheim.

Ben Oppenheim is a non-resident fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and at the Center for Global Development. Serina Ng is a Director at the World Health Organization and Executive Head of the G20 Joint Finance Health Task Force Secretariat, which is hosted at the WHO.

The episode is freely available across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen directly below.

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The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the guests and the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast’s partners.

Transcript edited for clarity

Ben Oppenheim: And a lot of the factors that are driving pandemic risk are factors that unfold on the timescale of decades. And so, we need to be looking ahead and try to understand as best we can both the risk here and now and how that risk is likely to shift.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast for the foreign policy and global development communities and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what is driving events in the world today. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg. I am a veteran international affairs journalist and the editor of UN Dispatch. Enjoy the show!

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as a part of a series called Before the Outbreak, which examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. Please visit www.globaldispatches.org to find other episodes in this series. And just one note — the views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the guests and the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast’s partners.

Now, here is Serina Ng and Ben Oppenheim.

So, in the first episode of this series, we discussed what constitutes disease surveillance. And this is distinct from what we’ll be discussing today, pandemic risk assessment, which is a new scientific effort to assess how pandemic risk is evolving over time. But before we discuss what would constitute a pandemic risk assessment, can you explain what gap such an effort would fill in our current global architecture for pandemic preparedness and response? Why, Serina, is something like this needed?

Serina Ng: So, I think we should just draw on our recent experience of COVID-19 and the experience of that pandemic. We know that there were really serious health, social and economic impacts. And, as policymakers, so during that time, I was working at the UK government in HM Treasury, the Ministry of Finance, and working very closely with other departments. But as policymakers, we felt that there was a gap in terms of information, both building up to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also on an ongoing basis. I think at the core, we know that pandemics are high impact events with really disastrous impacts on not just health, but the global economy. And the IMF estimate that the pandemic cost us all $13 trillion globally and pushed almost 100 million back into poverty.

So, it’s also set back development gains. And many economies are still facing that impact. So, when we think about what could have been done to reduce that, many countries had made preparations. There was not a common shared assessment of the risk and scale of future pandemics. And therefore, the expected sort of impact and options for preventing such an event were not universally shared or accessible. And what I think also it meant was that during the pandemic, there were really big gaps in the speed and scale, particularly in the financial response, which was necessary to support the health and economic response.

And we know that faster response would have really reduced the impact and saved lives and protected livelihoods. So really, I think it’s about thinking about how we fill that gap, given that I think there is quite a lot of evidence that this isn’t just a one-off.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Ben, what gaps from a scientific perspective might a pandemic risk assessment help to fill? Serina articulated a lot of the policy gaps that such an assessment would fill. What on the scientific side of things might it help do?

Ben Oppenheim: So, the problem we’re trying to solve is that we have deep gaps in our understanding of pandemic risk scientifically. And those gaps absolutely make the world vulnerable. And maybe it’s best to start with an example. If you think back to the understanding of COVID-19 during the pandemic, it was widely described as a once-in-a-century event, which made sense in a certain way because it occurred about 100 years after the 1918 flu, which was the last mega pandemic.

But it would be convenient if that were true that these kinds of events occurred on a once-in-a-century cadence or at a once-in-a-century probability of occurrence. But there have really been a steady drumbeat of pandemics. We’ve had two in the 21st century and a series in the 20th century of flu pandemics and emergence of novel viruses like HIV. And we are consistently surprised. And those surprises, as Serina outlined, have enormous costs for all of us. And so, part of the gap that needs to be filled technically is to better understand the types of threats we faced, which viruses are most likely to not just spark outbreaks, but evolve into pandemics.

And then the probability of those events occurring. And none of this is stationary. We have a sense from the data that pandemic risk is changing, and that the frequency of these events might be increasing due to a range of potential drivers like climate change and ecological disruption. What we don’t know yet, what we can learn as a community, is how quickly it’s changing and which drivers matter most. And that kind of information will be essential for policymakers to make wiser decisions about how to address the risk.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Ben, I wanted to stick with you in terms of kind of what drivers might matter most, what would be some of the scientific inputs that would inform pandemic risk assessment and constitute a pandemic risk assessment?

Ben Oppenheim: I spoke briefly about climate change and ecological disruption. And we know that those are likely two central factors influencing the occurrence of disease spillover in human populations. Then there are a lot of question marks about the social factors, which range from mobility patterns, you know, how humans move, both in terms of short-term travel and migration, as well as factors that shape how we all respond to outbreaks like misinformation, disinformation, which impacts our willingness to get vaccinated or work with non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing policies.

And all of those factors add up to really potentially significant changes in the risk. So, to understand how pandemic risk is changing, we need to develop a holistic picture of both of the push factors on the ecological, climatological side that might lead to more frequent disease spillover in humans, and then how that interacts with changes in how we live, how we behave, how we interact, how we work together. And all of that potentially adds up to pretty substantial evolutions in the risk over time. That’s what we need to understand better.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Serina, from a policy perspective, how might some of the inputs, if collected together and analyzed in a productive way that Ben just described, help inform policymakers?

Serina Ng: There is a lot of information and data and research out there. And actually, I think since COVID, there’s been significant efforts. The WHO has a priority list of pathogens. The WHO pandemic agreement was agreed to last year. You have pandemic fund in other areas. So, I think that there’s been a lot of change and new initiatives. But the thing that is still missing is this kind of global assessment of risks and risk drivers and likely scenarios, as Ben says.

So, there are some policy actions you can do without having a pandemic risk assessment. But if we think about the purpose of a lot of those initiatives, they need to be really grounded in a common understanding and assessment of the risk because they all need to coordinate with each other and governments need to coordinate both internally and externally with not just other countries, but international institutions and organizations. So, I think that, firstly, it would just enable better coordination because everybody has access to the same information.

There’s no asymmetry in information. And everybody also knows this is not going to be a perfect list and assessment of the risks and threats, but also where the really big uncertainties are. I think in terms of then sort of how this would then be used, so policymakers basically, as I said, need baseline information. So, for example, when I was in the Ministry of Finance, you want to know what the likely impacts are on the economy and to make informed decisions on how to better prepare and which pathogens are likely to have the biggest impact. How will they emerge? How can you detect them better?

What should you have in place for responding if there are health risks? And if things do develop, how much do you think this is going to cost and what level of reserves you might need? So, I think that’s sort of really the sort of key to what a global robust pandemic risk assessment can add. And it can also help identify where some of the policy questions you have might need further work to be answered, and really get that coherence between where the science is and what the sort of questions are being asked on the policy side.

And then I think the last thing I’d say is that, it really is to help develop a long-term approach to preventing and really focusing on that and preparing for a pandemic rather than this kind of response, which we know is just far more expensive for the global economy and also just for all of us in terms of health and social impacts. Finally, governments are faced with constrained resources. So, you’ve got multiple ongoing budgetary pressures and needs, social spending, infrastructure, etc. Also, climate change and other risks such as natural disasters. And so, when we think about the information we need on what’s happening or what’s likely to happen with those risks, we need to be able to think about the risk of pandemics on a similar basis to really compare what governments should prioritize.

And that would obviously be a decision that each government would make based on their own political preferences.

Mark Leon Goldberg: What would transform this idea that we’re talking about today into an actual existing entity or process? Like, what would be a pathway for political uptake of pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: It needs to be an iterative process. The discussion that we’re having here is probably an example of how you need to bring together the different policy demands and sort of what a policymaker in ministry of finance might be different from what a policymaker in a department of health might want. And I think that is one of the sort of key things. I think firstly, it is really having those really complex discussions with policymakers on what they need and what would be useful for them. And then I think you would need to have those sort of parallel conversations on the technical side and bring that together.

So, I think it’s quite an intensive and iterative process to come up with something that will have a strong use case. And I think that is really what you’ll need if you want to make it, something that’s real and that is used.

Mark Leon Goldberg: From a scientific perspective, are there any entities out there that the pandemic risk assessment might look to potentially as a model?

Ben Oppenheim: There are a lot of sources of inspiration out there that we look to. There’s in fact a whole class of organizations often called science policy interfaces that exist to solve exactly the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve, to help scientists come together through a structured process, an organization, or a mechanism to really understand the state of the science, to come to consensus if possible on what it means, and then to translate that oftentimes into analyses and results and arguments that can help inform policy.

That kind of work is often deeply interdisciplinary. So, the IPCC, for example, brings a number of different disciplines together under one large roof to help the world make sense of a changing climate, what’s driving it and what it means. In a similar fashion, we need to bring together a wide range of communities — virology, ecology, social sciences, economics — to understand that complex interplay I was describing earlier between drivers of viral spillover and spread, and then translate that into an understanding of the impact on societies. So there are a lot of potential models we can look to.

And I think it’s important to note that the IPCC is one possible structure for a science policy interface, but it’s not the only one. Just in the last few years, we’ve had similar structures built for chemicals, waste and pollution, for artificial intelligence, for AMR, antimicrobial resistance. So, there are a lot of science policy interfaces out there, and they vary in terms of their design. And so that is something that we’re beginning to investigate, to think carefully about different options in terms of both design and deployment of a science policy interface. And we’re in active listening mode to try to understand which options are politically viable and which options can deliver results.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That’s interesting. The IPCC is probably, arguably, the most well-known of these science policy interfaces. Every few years, you’ll get a new IPCC report that synthesizes a lot of the latest research on climate change and in a really coherent way for policymakers, articulates the implications of their latest scientific consensus. Serina, is that like a model that you see as a potential for pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how the IPCC has evolved over time. And I think the current outputs where you have enormous amounts of underlying scientific research going on, and a lot of it interdisciplinary. And then you have this kind of, I think it’s about a 20 page kind of policy executive summary that provides sort of some headline figures and details, I think is very helpful in terms of really just setting out some of the key aspects and its role in terms of being the consensus from all the experts.

So, I think the sort of idea of something that is usable, that’s robust, that is the best available evidence out there and how that translates into impacts on people, there are some really important elements in there that policymakers need. And I think, just going back to kind of what you need as a policymaker, I think the ultimate question as well is just like, who is impacted? Who, by geography, by social factors, by the scale of impact are the sort of detail that you need to know to start to be able to think about what targeted policies look like.

And the other thing I think that is really useful in the IPCC comparison is this long-term approach. So, if you don’t do anything now, then this is what is likely to happen in terms of temperature rise, in terms of impact on agriculture, water, more broadly, natural disasters, etc. I think that is also quite helpful in terms of just planting that long-term view for policymakers, where obviously the short-term cycle can be stronger, given the political nature of spending decisions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: It sounds like it’s almost institutionalizing long-term thinking, which is necessary for pandemic preparedness and response.

Ben Oppenheim: I think that’s an essential point. I mean, these are low frequency, high severity events. They occur sporadically. And a lot of the factors that are driving pandemic risk are factors that unfold on the timescale of decades. And so, we need to be looking ahead and try to understand as best we can, both the risk here and now and how that risk is likely to shift. And a lot of the investments that we need to make to mitigate the risk, to address it, to prevent or contain events that could become pandemics are going to be long-term investments. So, I think that lens is absolutely essential.

And I want to pick up on one other feature of the IPCC that Serina alluded to, which is the regular nature of the assessment process, that these reports that it produces occur on a known cadence and cycle. And I think for us, that is a really important inspiration because we need a steady cadence like that to help us keep score, to understand and to catalyze political will so that leaders and publics have a sense of where the risk is trending and whether they’re responding appropriately to it.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And, on that point, Serina, in the coming months or years, even, are there any kind of moments in international diplomacy or policymaking that you see as an opportune chance to advance this idea and help to institutionalize, in some way or another, pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: I think there are various events in the international calendar that are really good opportunities where you have a gathering of international community for certain issues. I think that, of course, we have the UN high-level meeting on pandemic PPR this year, but I think that there are also many other opportunities for engaging with the right stakeholders. I think each of these are sort of steppingstones in the development of a pandemic risk assessment. So, I think that the high-level meeting is an important opportunity, but that it is part of this kind of iterative process to really gather the views and thoughts of the many stakeholders who will both be sort of customers of this work, but also will be hopefully inputting and supporting it as well.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Ben, I suppose, similarly, you alluded earlier about how different scientific inputs into a pandemic risk assessment are kind of somewhat siloed at the moment to a certain extent. How do you therefore kind of socialize this idea of a more collaborative or integrated approach among the scientific community going forward?

Ben Oppenheim: This is something that we’re actively working on at the moment. I think it’s important to note that we’re not starting from scratch. In some scientific communities, there’s been an enormous amount of work to assemble data, methods, tools that can help answer critical questions about pandemic risk and how it’s changing. And the challenge, Mark, as you said, is hooking those together in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts to answer really fundamental questions for policy. So we’ve been holding a series of meetings now, stretching back almost two years, to bring scientific communities that often don’t talk to each other together, to see both how they think about pandemic risk, the kinds of data and methods they bring to the table, and begin to feel out how they would collaborate to answer questions jointly. So that’s an evolving process. We have another meeting upcoming this year.

And probably the best thing we can do is demonstrate results by building prototype tools and getting some of these analyses out there in the world, both for policymakers to react to and for scientists to see as proof of concept. Ultimately, I think for scientists, we want our work to have meaning and to make impact on these problems. That’s an essential part of the enterprise. And when there’s a demand signal from policy requesting better answers to these types of technical questions, scientists will often respond. So that is really, I think, part of what I’m hoping for, that we can generate that demand signal to inspire scientists and to bring them together around a common set of problems.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Now, Serina and Ben, is there anything else you wanted to make sure you got in, discuss before we conclude?

Ben Oppenheim: I think better information on pandemic risk can help make many, many other types of policy decisions, if not easier, at least clearer. And preparedness is probably a key example of this. It can sometimes be helpful to think with analogies. And if you imagine earthquakes, for example, we have buildings that are rated to withstand certain levels of shake, certain magnitudes of earthquakes. And there’s really nothing analogous in how we prepare for pandemics.

And that’s a gap. It’s a really important gap because a health system might be able to withstand and say support a population to get through a COVID-19 level respiratory pandemic, but be completely unprepared for something on the magnitude of the 1918 flu in terms of peak infections and death rates. So, preparedness is not a generic concept. We can be prepared for some threats and not for others. And so, generating better understanding, both of the types of threats that might emerge and the probability of pandemics of different severity levels, that can help make preparedness choices potentially a lot easier in terms of making, as Serina mentioned earlier, wise bets about where to allocate constrained resources.

How many vaccines or masks do we need to stockpile? How many respirators? Where? What do we spend on that? Versus other types of preparedness investments. Those kinds of choices in a resource-constrained environment matter deeply, and we can help make them more effectively with better information on risk.

Serina Ng: I think the only other thing I think just wanted to emphasize, because I think I don’t want it to come across that we’re basically saying that countries can’t do anything without this. I think it’s much more the point. So, countries sort of prepare mostly individually. They use their sort of latest assessment they have, they work with the WHO, and their own sort of scientific community and the international community. I think the really big point is, is that building this together in a consensus driven way reduces the issues of coordination and everybody essentially working off a different set of assumptions.

When you consider about what the global nature of pandemics, it would make far more sense for everybody to, at least be aware of, they don’t have to use it, but to be aware of a common set of assumptions about risk pathways and impact. I think that’s just quite an important point because it doesn’t diminish what lots of countries have done. And it’s a national issue, really, in terms of what you do on this.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Serina and Ben, thank you so much for your time.

Serina Ng: Thanks, Mark.

Ben Oppenheim: Thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And, of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.

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