Mobilising against the pandemic threat

Private businesses have a huge role to play - indeed their co-operation is essential. The private sector manufactures all vaccines, for example, produces and distributes food, fuel and medical equipment, and so on.

A disruption of these services could not be replaced by government bodies, and nor should they be. Agreements should be made beforehand with key businesses, and the private sector involved in emergency planning. While national security is potentially the issue, the same restrictions of intelligence and clearance will not be applicable in the same degree that they are when the national security issue is a human aggressor.

Planning could begin with the production of large amounts of anti virals, very likely an effective weapon in the battle against influenza. Vaccine production would most likely have to wait until the epidemic had actually begun as the particular strain of ‘flu would first have to be isolated. “Sleeper” factories could be designated, ready to go into mass production once the vaccine had been created. This would probably make more sense than nationalising existing factories.

It is difficult to imagine the scenario being discussed in the absence of a real pandemic, but it could change the world almost overnight. Populations in Western countries would not be quarantined from the effects, as they are to a large extent from the everyday realities of the war in Iraq for instance.

There would be nothing to see on television, only emptying public spaces and growing numbers listing the dead. The globalised planet would temporarily shut down and retreat back into fortress nation states. Immigration, travel and trade would have to all but cease, at least temporarily.

The problem is real, it’s big, and it has the potential to threaten the survival of sovereign states. This does not mean that every aspect of an epidemic needs to be under the sole control of the military. Disease remains primarily a public health issue, associated with the domestic sphere and with keeping people alive, while security is usually related to the military sphere and aggression.

The inherent opposition between the domestic and the military has to be reconciled if we want practical solutions. The ethical questions - on quarantine, triage, vaccine allocation, for example - will cause deep divides and it is important to have those debates now, before a pandemic begins and fear and a ticking bomb skew our collective thinking.

Personal liberties will again be in the front trenches - as they are today in debates on terrorism prevention - but in an even more immediate and more intimate position. The need for a blanket approach - for total co-ordination of military, local and federal government, the private sector, as well as of global efforts - is far more relevant to disease than it is even to anti-terrorism measures.

Submission to disease is not an act of malicious intent; how then do we deal with the infected? How would our social capital stand up to the strain of an indiscriminate and invisible invader with a potential for devastation that could outdo the most disgruntled human powder keg?

Nation states need very visible, very practical and very well explained procedures to counteract the social and economic fall-out of the organisms themselves, which could be just as damaging to our national fabric.

Today, the greatest threat of pandemic yet to appear in modern times is on the horizon. Avian influenza, H5N1, “bird flu” is flashing early warning signs like lightning in a distant storm cloud.

The first step is to realise the threat to national security that can exist in a naturally occurring epidemic, and to understand the necessity of being able to present a wholly integrated national (and then trans-national) plan to combat it. The second is to prepare to wage total war on our own soil, to harness all resources, public and private, and to ensure other countries are doing likewise.

A worldwide pandemic will be the true test of just how co-ordinated and integrated and resilient our globalised world is. Let’s just hope the pustules and plague pits remain where they are, well behind us.