Did 2022 Mark the End of the Pandemic?

U.S. President Joe Biden’s blunt declaration in September that “the pandemic is over” came as a surprise to many in U.S. policymaking circles, including some of Biden’s own health officials. The remark, which was quickly downplayed by the White House, was met with dismay from public health experts, who pointed out that hundreds of Americans still die on a near-daily basis of COVID-19. Biden’s messaging, they warned, could harm vaccination campaigns, risk public funding for tests and treatments, and endanger future efforts to address new variants.

Yet Biden’s remark reflected a reality—the world has largely reopened. Nearly 13 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide; many border closures have ended; schools and businesses have resumed, as have indoor dining and leisure travel; and mask-wearing has plummeted. (Even the small local grocer in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood—the last holdout in the area—abandoned its mask requirement this fall.) Policymakers and the public alike, at least in much of the world, are treating the pandemic as a matter of the past.

The same could not be said of China. Anti-lockdown protests that erupted across the country in late November served as a reminder of the rift between Beijing’s and the rest of the world’s approaches to the pandemic. Of course, China has not been the only state to implement mass lockdowns long after the initial outbreak in December 2019; New Zealand and Singapore, for instance, did not ease their own zero-COVID strategies until late 2021. However, China is the only major economy to have maintained its strict posture on the pandemic for nearly three years. That has changed since the unrest. But in effectively ending its zero-COVID policy, Beijing has opened the floodgates to major surges, overflowing hospitals, and waves of deaths.

For its part, the World Health Organization has not ended its public health emergency—though it has said the end of the pandemic, which has killed more than 6.6 million people, is “in sight.” But regardless, pundits and politicians have begun thinking of COVID-19 in the past tense. For many, the pandemic, and the destruction it wrought, has become something to reflect on.

This year, Foreign Policy contributors, from the former president of Liberia to the U.S. treasury secretary, looked back on what went wrong, which countries handled COVID-19 well, and how the pandemic shaped geopolitics. They also looked ahead to the next outbreak and what it might take to better prepare for it. Below are five Foreign Policy essays this year that helped us make sense of the pandemic as the world began to move on.

1. Turns Out COVID-19 Didn’t Reshape Geopolitics

by Daniel W. Drezner, Sept. 29

In the summer of 2020, political scientist Dan Drezner had an unusual prediction about COVID-19: The pandemic, he posited, would not be an epoch-making event, but rather “a profound but temporary shock without much of a lasting effect” on geopolitics.

More than two years later, Drezner revisited his initial argument to see which parts of it held up as the pandemic played out. His conclusion? “In the end, the pandemic had a minimal material impact on the international system; COVID-19 is one of many factors over the past decade that have heightened great-power competition. But its impact on economic ideologies cannot be dismissed.”

2. Who Managed COVID-19 Best, and Why?

by David E. Adler, June 26

Two and a half years after the initial outbreak of COVID-19, Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One by Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health, hit bookstores. Sridhar’s central argument was rather straightforward: Many of the pandemic’s worst consequences, she believes, were preventable. Her book, according to David E. Adler, is complex, hugely nuanced, and difficult to pin down.

Preventable, Adler writes, is partly a “work of advocacy” for more robust government responses to public health crises. It also serves as a comparative analysis of countries’ pandemic strategies. “Indeed, the core of Preventable, and what I believe will be its lasting contribution, is how and why countries responded to COVID-19 differently,” Adler writes. “Rich countries did not necessarily handle the pandemic better than poor ones, showing that something else is at work besides money.”

Sridhar’s findings, Adler argues, are valuable—and in examining them alongside literature on the varieties of capitalism, Adler comes to some useful conclusions of his own.

3. China’s Protests Punch a Hole in Xi’s Credibility 

by Deng Yuwen, Dec. 1

In his essay on China’s anti-lockdown protests, writer and scholar Deng Yuwen traces the public’s response to the government’s lockdowns over the past few years, from tacit acceptance to nationwide unrest, analyzing the factors that pushed the Chinese people to the brink. After hopes of relaxed restrictions were dashed once again in November, Deng writes, the “repeated cycles of easing and tightening, caging people like lab rats, finally wore through the last of people’s patience.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s approach to the pandemic—one that, in Deng’s words, “deprives the public of their freedom and rights and has led to countless humanitarian disasters”—had become unsustainable, especially amid an economic downturn. And the demonstrations that approach sparked, Deng argues, dealt a blow to Xi’s credibility.

4. The Status Quo Won’t Save Us From the Next Pandemic

by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Helen Clark, Aug. 27

Syrians walk past a mural painted as part of a UNICEF and World Health Organization awareness campaign in the northeastern Hasakah province of Syria on Aug. 16, 2020. The mural displays tips on how to avoid COVID-19 after a spike in coronavirus infections in the area. DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images

What happens when the next pandemic threat comes along? If the world does not prepare now, it risks another public health catastrophe. But there are clear steps the international community can take to stave off disaster, argue Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, and Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand.

In this essay, Sirleaf and Clark, who co-chaired the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response—which was created by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general in response to COVID-19—outline five essential measures the international community should take to ensure the world is ready for the next outbreak, from strengthening the WHO to improving vaccine access. Underlying these recommendations is the premise that, in Sirleaf and Clark’s words, “[p]andemic threats are inevitable, but epidemics and pandemics are choices.”

5. The Next Pandemic Doesn’t Have to Hit So Hard

by Janet Yellen, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and Sri Mulyani Indrawati, April 21 

In April, three officials—U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati—advocated for the establishment of a global pandemic fund in Foreign Policy. The Financial Intermediary Fund they proposed would provide funding for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response in low- and middle-income countries. The point of the fund, the authors argued, would be to help “address the profound gaps in global health security architecture exposed by COVID-19.”

Less than five months later, that fund was established by the World Bank. This essay offers insight into the goals of the fund, the inadequate global pandemic response that led to its creation, and, crucially, the importance of breaking the “cycle of panic and neglect” with outbreaks of disease in order to create lasting solutions to public health crises, even when their immediate threat recedes.