The spring of 2026 has brought its share of infectious diseases across the world and it is not about to stop. With a new outbreak of the Ebola virus breaking out in the Democratic Republic of Congo and an outbreak of hantavirus infection reported aboard a cruise ship departing from Argentina, the world is becoming less and less resilient in the face of infectious epidemics, which are becoming more and more frequent and devastating.
This is what the Global Health Crisis Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) declared, in a report published this Monday, May 18, 2026 and relayed by the Guardian, which raises the alarm on the insufficiency and fragility of international health policies in the face of this major risk, although it is known and documented.
A political abandonment
According to this independent body of experts, created by the WHO and the World Bank in 2018, in response to the first Ebola epidemic, the climate crisis and armed conflicts increase the likelihood of the explosion of new pandemics, while any effective collective action to contain them is compromised by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial interests.
For Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, the two recent epidemics “are just the latest crises in our troubled world”. This global health crisis is notably the result of international policies which have worked to dismantle global prevention and care systems.
As Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Strategy at Georgetown University, explains, “When we withdraw billions of dollars from the WHO and dismantle USAID’s front-line programs, we destroy precisely the surveillance system supposed to detect these viruses early. We are seeing today the direct and deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”
If new technologies developed in the health sector, in particular mRNA vaccines, have enabled dazzling progress thanks to massive investments, the GPMB report points to a global decline in equitable access to vaccines, tests and treatments: during the last epidemics of smallpox B (monkey pox or monkeypox), it was necessary to wait almost two years for the necessary vaccines to be sent to the affected African countries – which had already waited no less than seventeen months for vaccines against Covid-19.
These health inequalities, which continue to be reinforced, contribute to undermining civil liberties and democratic standards, and have lasting effects even beyond the temporality of epidemic crises. Joy Phumaphi, co-chair of the GPMB and former Minister of Health of Botswana, notes that “if trust and cooperation continue to deteriorate, every country will be more vulnerable during the next pandemic”.
