A Red Cross worker in protective gear is sprayed with disinfectant in Kampala, Uganda, on Tuesday during the current Ebola outbreak.BADRU KATUMBA/AFP/Getty Images
Dan Werb is an epidemiologist, policy analyst and writer whose books include The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure, which was the winner of the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He is an associate professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto and in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego.
Humanity faced more epidemics from novel viruses in the past 20 years compared to the entirety of the 20th century. That’s no coincidence. The risk of viral spillover events from animals is increasing, and with it the likelihood that we will face yet another pandemic in short order.
The last few weeks have clarified how close we might just be. The hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius has so far caused three deaths and launched an international contact tracing effort to contain its spread. Meanwhile, an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa has so far killed more than 100, infected at least 500 (though likely far more), and is spreading rapidly across the region, prompting the World Health Organization to declare it a global public-health emergency. This is occurring at the same time the United States is in the midst of a scorched-earth retreat from its role as the world’s scientific powerhouse and leader in global pandemic preparedness, leaving Canada in a strange and uncomfortable position: neighbour to a hostile and vaccine-skeptical superpower as pathogenic threats accelerate toward us. The reality is we are more vulnerable than ever.
That may be a terrifying prospect, but there is reason for cautious optimism that Canada may just meet the moment. Still, it will take a transformation of our country’s pandemic preparedness to avoid the worst. Success, though, could establish Canada as a global leader in science and innovation.
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Matthew Herder is the director of Dalhousie University’s Health Law Institute and a keen observer of global regulations on viral surveillance and vaccine production. Dr. Herder is deeply concerned that America’s newfound isolationism isn’t just politically charged but has extended to pandemic information-gathering and sharing. This isn’t just an abstract worry. The virus most likely to cause the next pandemic is highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), otherwise known as bird flu, which has caused a “zoonotic” – an animal pandemic – that at last count has led to the deaths of more than 300 million wild birds.
But “avian” is misleading here: The current strain of HPAI can nimbly jump between species, including mammals. As a result, one of the worst HPAI epidemics in the world is concentrated among cattle herds in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 1,000 dairy cows have been infected across 20 states since an outbreak was first detected in 2024. A report also found that in 2024-25, 36 per cent of retail milk samples from 13 states – including five that had no reported outbreaks – tested positive for HPAI, meaning the epidemic is far larger than previously believed. It’s a disturbing insight, and reveals the information vacuum that exists on the true spread of a virus that scientists have found is only a single mutation away from being able to efficiently spread among human populations.
The current strain of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus can jump to mammals, and has been found in milk from dairy cows in the U.S. (though not Canada).Charlie Litchfield/The Associated Press
Put simply, the world is largely in the dark about the spread of HPAI – and many other pathogens. Worse, the Trump administration has gutted its investment in mRNA vaccination, which saved millions of lives during COVID-19 and is the most effective approach to rapidly preparing vaccines for pandemic threats.
“Are we going to have things to throw at the new pandemic,” asks Dr. Herder, “when one of the biggest sources of funding for all that R&D has essentially shut down?”
That challenge, he says, is what worries him the most. It’s far from a hypothetical: Unlike previous Ebola outbreaks, the current outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo virus, an Ebola strain for which no vaccine exists. The U.S.’s now-dormant mRNA vaccine production sector is ideally suited to quickly developing and testing the efficacy of a Bundibugyo vaccine to curtail its spread, using the COVID-19 vaccine playbook. But that is no longer an option, nor does any other country in the world have the resources to step up.
To counter that threat, Dr. Herder, like many experts, believes that Canada must radically scale up its disease surveillance and prevention capabilities. The problem is that an investment in public health appears at odds with the Carney government’s aim to reduce the budgets of federal departments by 15 per cent while boosting spending on Canada’s military. Dr. Herder thinks that calls for a perspective shift.
“If we can’t understand defence to include biodefence and infectious disease surveillance, I’d be really worried,” he says.
A pandemic, after all, is a real and serious threat to Canada’s security, and military spending should reflect that reality. But a short-term boost in funds won’t be enough to counter America’s retreat at a time when pathogenic threats are emerging at lightning speed.
In 2001, Angie Rasmussen, a virologist and a global expert in vaccine development, left a coveted research scientist position at Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity for a senior role at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Research Organization in Saskatoon. Though you may have never heard of it, VIDO, as it’s known, is Canada’s pre-eminent vaccine institute, and a critical component of the global system designed to create pandemic cures. Dr. Rasmussen and her colleagues have advanced key research on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and are working against the clock to develop cures for Ebola, MERS, HPAI, and many other pathogenic threats (her research was also the first to confirm that HPAI isn’t circulating in Canadian retail milk). Dr. Rasmussen has a unique perspective on the challenges Canada faces, having seen them from both sides of the border. And while she readily agrees that Canada should seize the mantle of public-health leadership, actually doing so is going to take more than moving budgets around.
Dr. Angie Rasmussen and her colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan are working to develop cures for Ebola, MERS, HPAI, and many other pathogenic threats.David Stobbe/Courtesy of manufacturer
“Canadians have a bit of a chip on their shoulder,” Dr. Rasmussen says. “I think there’s this feeling of being slighted and a strong desire to show that Canada is doing some incredible research. The motivation is there.”
What is missing is a coherent strategy to turn that desire into sustained action rather than letting promising made-in-Canada ideas die on the vine. One example she points to is CoVaRR-Net, a COVID-era surveillance network established in March, 2021, to track new variants of SARS-CoV-2. It was a major achievement and radically amplified Canada’s ability to prepare for pandemic waves. As the threat waned, though, the network was shut down.
Dr. Rasmussen sees that as short-sighted. Even though there was less of a need to track variants, “that didn’t mean a network like that should go away completely – we went through a lot of trouble to make laboratories working together across Canada a lot easier.” That included a universal material-transfer agreement that allowed reagents and other biological materials to be shared across labs. “These types of networks are really valuable for doing urgent research when new threats are emerging and you need all hands on deck,” she explains. But when it was time to renew funding for the network, the federal government balked at the price, even as it recognized the value of the system. For Dr. Rasmussen, that’s a major setback to Canada’s information sovereignty, and only one among numerous examples of funding to tackle huge issues ending soon as the immediate threat appears to have dissipated.
Beyond Canada’s proximity to the U.S. and a culture that currently devalues long-term support for surveillance and producing cures, there’s one more threat Canada faces in responding to a pandemic: our country’s Arctic region. That might seem odd at first glance, but the Earth’s polar regions are warming at about four times the planetary average, transforming the Arctic into a natural experiment in rapid environmental change. As seasonal wildfires become more destructive, wild animals fleeing the flames – red foxes, deer, black bears, beavers and many species of wild birds – have begun migrating north to save themselves and infecting Arctic animals with new pathogens when they arrive. That has transformed the region into a hotbed of spillover events, with pathogens being shared from the new arrivals to resident animals like walruses as well as to migrating birds such as terns, which then spread novel viruses across the globe.
A single spillover event won’t necessarily doom us. But as animal migration patterns shift in response to climate change, the Arctic is now experiencing outbreaks of trichinella, rabies, anthrax and many others, making the region a potential hotbed for pathogens with pandemic potential. As an Arctic nation, Canada has a responsibility to conduct wildlife surveillance and establish an early warning system when outbreaks occur; the first death of a polar bear from HPAI, confirmed less than two weeks ago in the Arctic region of Svalbard in Norway, is an alarming signal that Canada has already fallen behind. In a region as vast as the Arctic, though, pinpointing where, when and how outbreaks happen is an incredibly complex challenge. The only way forward, especially for a middle power with limited resources, is to learn from Arctic communities that have long depended on the movement and health of wild animals to sustain themselves. That necessity for deep expertise has thrust Inuit communities into leading roles as the first line of pandemic defence.
Sean Hillier is a global-health epidemiologist and holds a research chair in Indigenous health policy and One Health at York University. Like all practitioners of One Health, Dr. Hillier subscribes to the idea that pandemics can only be prevented through a combination of better human health, animal health and environmental health. Dr. Hillier, who is also a member of the Qalipu First Nation in Newfoundland, has been working for the past five years on an Inuit-led surveillance project alongside the Canadian government, Britain and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a national organization representing the interests of Canada’s 70,000 Inuit. In that time, Dr. Hillier has seen the Arctic and subarctic regions change dramatically.
As an Arctic nation, Canada has a responsibility to conduct wildlife surveillance and establish an early warning system when infectious disease outbreaks occur.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Associated Press
“Just after the wildfires,” he says, “there were massive populations of dead birds that Inuit had never seen before. The birds had fled north and died of exhaustion and hunger.” Dr. Hillier also notes that the northern migration of beavers to Arctic areas has radically transformed the landscape, redirecting waterways and causing issues with Arctic char reproduction. He’s also seen evidence of apocalypse-tinged events, like widespread cannibalism among walruses infected with the parasite trichinella. While Inuit are witnessing these changes up close as they track animals for subsistence hunting, “there’s no comprehensive system to report any of this,” Dr. Hillier says.
That’s compounded by long-standing distrust of government by Inuit given the brutal legacy of colonialism, which includes a decades-long campaign of sled-dog slaughter that kept communities unable to hunt and dependent on the Canadian government for support. This means there are long-standing issues about reporting to government agencies like the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Inuit communities have a deep understanding and knowledge of local wildlife and spillover risks, says Dr. Hillier, “but when one happens, will they tell someone?” Reporting outbreaks can mean that hunts are cut and federal agencies enter Inuit communities, which further breeds mistrust.
Like Dr. Rasmussen, Dr. Hillier helped build a pandemic surveillance network; unlike Dr. Rasmussen’s, the network Dr. Hillier worked on was centred on Inuit wildlife monitoring, with community hunts serving a dual purpose of informing Arctic spillover surveillance. As different as the projects were, both shared the same fate: After an initial investment, the federal government declined to continue supporting the Inuit-led wildlife surveillance network despite its evident benefits. “It’s expensive to do,” Dr. Hillier concedes, “costing millions of dollars per year. But in the grand scheme,” like preventing a pandemic, “it’s not expensive at all.”
These funding decisions all came prior to the re-election of Donald Trump and his assault on Canada’s sovereignty. They also predate the sudden emergence of multiple pathogenic threats – Ebola, hantavirus, and HPAI, a virus on the knife’s edge of mutating to infect human populations. Evidently, the calculus has changed since then. As a multilateral actor, Canada is ideally positioned to lead the kind of collective action required to protect ourselves and the globe in this new pandemic age. To do so, we need to understand biodefence as a critical component of a robust military, that protecting the Arctic from outbreaks begins with Inuit communities, and that our country has the resources to prepare for and prevent the next pandemic – but only if we change our culture and make long-term bets on innovation. If we do, Canada might just emerge stronger, more resilient and a key player in preventing the deaths of millions from whatever pathogen next threatens our species.