To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war. The world needs to double down on investments in R&D and organizations like CEPI that have proven invaluable with COVID-19. We also need to build brand-new capabilities that don't exist yet.

Stopping the next pandemic will require spending tens of billions of dollars per year – a big investment, but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to cost the world $28 trillion. The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths). I think of this as the best and most cost-efficient insurance policy the world could buy.

The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge. If you live in a rich country, it's in your best interest for your government to go big on pandemic preparedness around the world. Melinda wrote that COVID-19 anywhere is a threat to health everywhere; the same is true of the next potential pandemic. The tools and systems created to stop pathogens in their tracks need to span the globe, including in low- and middle-income countries.

To start, governments need to continue investing in the scientific tools that are getting us through this current pandemic – even after COVID-19 is behind us. New breakthroughs will give us a leg up the next time a new disease emerges. It took months to get enough testing capacity for COVID-19 in the United States. But it's possible to build up diagnostics that can be deployed very quickly. By the next pandemic, I'm hopeful we'll have what I call mega-diagnostic platforms, which could test as much as 20 percent of the global population every week.

I'm confident that we will have better treatments next time, too. One of the most promising COVID-19 therapeutics is monoclonal antibodies. If a patient gets them early enough, you can potentially reduce the death rate by as much as 80 percent.

Our foundation has funded research into monoclonal antibodies as a potential treatment for flu and malaria for over a decade. These antibodies can be used to treat any number of diseases. The downside is that they're time-consuming to develop and manufacture. It will likely take another five years of perfecting the technology before we can quickly churn them out in response to new pathogens.

I also expect we'll see huge advances over the next five years in our ability to develop new vaccines – in large part due to the success of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. I wrote about this at length in my Year in Review, but the short version is that mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine that delivers instructions to teach your body to fight off a pathogen. Although our foundation has been funding research into this new platform since 2014, no mRNA vaccine had been approved for use before last month. This pandemic has massively sped up the platform's development process.

Just as I think we'll see huge improvements in diagnostics and monoclonal antibodies, I predict that mRNA vaccines will become faster to develop, easier to scale, and more stable to store over the next five to ten years. That would be a huge breakthrough, both for future pandemics and for other global health challenges. mRNA vaccines are a promising platform for diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. The R&D progress made as a result of COVID-19 might one day give us the tools we need to finally end these deadly diseases.

When it comes to preventing pandemics, scientific tools alone aren't enough. The world also needs field-based capabilities that constantly monitor for troubling pathogens and can be spun up as soon as they're needed. There is still a lot to be figured out in terms of specifics, including where these capabilities would be housed and how exactly they'd be structured. But here is my broad thinking:

First, we need to spot disease outbreaks as soon as they happen, wherever they happen. That will require a global alert system, which we don't have at large scale today. The backbone of this system would be diagnostic testing. Let's say you're a nurse at a rural health clinic. You notice that more patients are showing up with coughs than you'd expect for this time of year, or maybe even that more people are dying than normal. So, you test for common pathogens. If none of them test positive, your sample is sent elsewhere to get sequenced for further investigation.

If your sample turns out to be some super infectious – or entirely new – pathogen, a group of infectious disease first responders springs into action. Think of this corps as a pandemic fire squad. Just like firefighters, they're fully trained professionals who are ready to respond to potential crises at a moment's notice. When they aren't actively responding to an outbreak, they keep their skills sharp by working on diseases like malaria and polio. I estimate that we need somewhere around 3,000 responders throughout the world.

To learn how to best use these first responders, the world needs to regularly run germ games – simulations that let us practice, analyze, and improve how we respond to disease outbreaks, just as war games let the military prepare for real-life warfare. Speed matters in a pandemic. The faster you act, the faster you cut off exponential growth of the virus. Places that had recent experiences with respiratory outbreaks – such as Taiwan with SARS and South Korea with MERS – responded to COVID-19 more quickly than other places because they already knew what to do. Running simulations will make sure everyone is ready to act quickly next time.

Ultimately, the thing that makes me the most optimistic that we'll be ready next time is also the simplest: The world now understands how seriously we should take pandemics. No one needs to be convinced that an infectious disease could kill millions of people or shut down the global economy. The pain of this past year will be seared into people's thinking for a generation. I am hopeful that we'll see broad support for efforts that make sure we never have to experience this hardship again. We're already seeing new pandemic preparedness strategies emerge, including from this year's UK-led G7, and I expect to see more in the months and years to come.

The world wasn't ready for the COVID-19 pandemic. I think next time will be different.

A healthier, brighter future for all

As hard as it is to imagine right now while so many people are still suffering from COVID-19, this pandemic will come to an end someday. When that moment comes, it will be a testament to the remarkable leaders who have emerged over the last year to steer us through this crisis.

When we say "leaders," we don't just mean the policymakers and elected officials who are in charge of the official government response. We're also talking about the healthcare workers who are enduring unimaginable trauma on the frontlines. The teachers, parents, and caregivers who are going above and beyond to make sure kids don't fall behind in school. The scientists and researchers who are working around the clock to stop this virus. Even the neighbors who are cooking extra meals to make sure no one in their community goes hungry.

Their leadership will get us through this pandemic, and we owe it to them to recover in a way that leaves us stronger and more prepared for the next challenge. Over the last year, a global threat touched nearly every person on the planet. By next year, we hope an equitable, effective COVID-19 response will have reached the whole world, too.

We hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy in these difficult times.