In December 2019, as the world was looking ahead to a new year, a novel virus was quietly spreading in China. Soon, the Covid-19 pandemic would bring the world to a grinding halt, forcing billions of people into unprecedented lockdowns and shuttering economies worldwide. Five years on, we are still grappling with the effects of this "grey rhino": a high-probability risk that was nonetheless neglected or ignored.
What did we learn? For starters, the pandemic exposed flaws in the design of the global economy. In our interconnected world, the virus spread globally within weeks. Governments were reluctant to do what was necessary to prevent or stop it. While the World Health Organization issued warnings, it lacked the resources or authority to take decisive action. As hospitalisations mounted, not a single healthcare system in the world proved to be a match for the virus.
Moreover, inequality -- both between and within countries -- fuelled heightened social tensions during lockdowns. In the wake of the vaccine rollout, wealthier countries hoarded doses while billions of people in poorer countries had to wait months or even years for access.
This "vaccine nationalism" was a failure. New virus variants soon emerged, prolonging the pandemic and undermining the global recovery. The pandemic also exposed and fuelled a loss of trust in institutions, as mis- and disinformation campaigns led to disaffection with government pandemic responses. The pandemic also lent urgency to questions that can seem remote to the quotidian functioning of the economy. Should we consider the economy independent of its host society, and can a global economy exist without global institutions?
For a fleeting moment, it looked like Covid could be the wake-up call that would finally bring about greater economic solidarity. When the severity of the crisis became apparent, many governments moved to enforce lockdowns, protect vulnerable populations, and roll out fiscal and monetary interventions to prevent an economic freefall. It was the first time in living memory that policymakers started listening more closely to epidemiologists than economists, prioritising people over profits.
But a scientific breakthrough abruptly ended this moral state of exception. As the economic historian Adam Tooze argued, the mRNA vaccine allowed global capitalism to escape a reckoning once again. The pandemic clearly demonstrated that our current economic systems, with their myopic focus on short-term interests, are fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with what the ecologist and microbiologist Garrett Hardin called a "tragedy of the commons". But this inherent fragility was soon papered over.
While the impetus for reform was lost, it is still obvious that we need international institutions that can align longer-term global interests with shorter-term incentives. The vaccines allowed Covid to be treated as an aberration, but we must not forget what it really was: A preview of the kind of planetary challenges that await us. In the face of climate change, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, and other developments, cooperative cross-border solutions are not a starry-eyed indulgence but an existential necessity.
Since the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, we have largely gone back to business as usual, averting our gaze from the frailty of global supply chains that resulted in shortages of basic goods -- the consequence of "just-in-time" manufacturing and overreliance on concentrated production hubs in the name of efficiency. Rather than reinventing our production networks to make them more resilient and decentralised, we are once again on a quest for the cheapest possible "world factory".
The "essential workers" whom we briefly honoured, clanging our pots and pans, remain a largely non-unionised precariat lacking the assurances of a strong social safety net. The inequalities that we decried have grown only worse, with Oxfam observing that the pandemic left five billion people poorer while doubling the fortunes of the world's five richest men.
Similarly, the outcry over racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd is now being dismissed as part of the "woke" agenda that US voters rejected at the ballot box in November. After two years of negotiations, the draft of a global pandemic treaty remains unsigned, and the seven million people killed directly by the virus have become mere statistics.
It is worth remembering that Covid-19 was a single "grey rhino", and it was enough to paralyse us. A herd of rhinos -- the risk we face in 2025 -- is called, fittingly, a "crash". ©2025 Project Syndicate
Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.