In early 2020, the world discovered the cost of not taking Pascal's Wager seriously. Warnings about pandemic risk had circulated for years—from SARS to MERS to annual flu preparedness reports. The probability seemed low enough to justify minimal investment. Then COVID-19 arrived, and the asymmetry became undeniable: preparedness would have cost billions, but unpreparedness cost trillions.

This is Pascal's Wager in retrospect: a case study in what happens when we bet against preparation and lose catastrophically. The question now is whether we'll learn the lesson for next time.

The Wager We Didn't Take

Pre-pandemic warnings were clear and specific. Public health experts, epidemiologists, and even popular media highlighted pandemic risk. Bill Gates gave a TED talk in 2015 warning that the world wasn't ready.^[1] The Obama administration created a pandemic playbook. Multiple simulations and exercises tested response capabilities and found them wanting.

But warnings didn't translate to investment. Pandemic preparedness competed with immediate needs—healthcare, education, infrastructure. The probability of a pandemic in any given year seemed low. The cost of preparation seemed high. The political incentives favored visible, immediate spending over invisible, future protection.

This is the challenge of Pascal's Wager in practice: when the catastrophe hasn't happened yet, it's hard to justify the cost of prevention. Preparedness is invisible. Success looks like nothing happening. And nothing happening looks like wasted money.

The Asymmetry Revealed

COVID-19 revealed the asymmetry with brutal clarity. The direct economic cost exceeded $16 trillion in the United States alone.^[2] Millions died globally. Healthcare systems collapsed. Supply chains fractured. Education disrupted. Mental health deteriorated. The social and economic damage will echo for decades.

What would adequate preparedness have cost? Estimates vary, but maintaining stockpiles of PPE, ventilators, and testing capacity; funding vaccine platform development; strengthening public health infrastructure; and improving surveillance systems would have cost tens of billions annually. Perhaps $50-100 billion globally.

The asymmetry is stark: spending $100 billion on preparedness over a decade might have prevented $16 trillion in losses in a single year. Even if the probability of a pandemic was only 10% per decade, the expected value calculation overwhelmingly favored preparation.

But we didn't take the wager. We bet that the pandemic wouldn't come, or wouldn't be severe, or could be managed reactively. We were wrong on all counts.

The Technology That Worked

One area where we did take Pascal's Wager—perhaps inadvertently—was mRNA vaccine technology. Decades of research, much of it publicly funded, developed the platform that enabled rapid vaccine development. When COVID-19 emerged, mRNA vaccines went from concept to deployment in under a year.

This represents a successful Pascal's Wager: long-term investment in a technology that might never be needed, but proved transformative when crisis struck. The mRNA platform wasn't developed specifically for COVID-19—it was developed for potential future pandemics, cancer treatments, and other applications. The investment paid off catastrophically well.

The lesson: some Pascal's Wagers are worth taking even if the specific threat is uncertain. Platform technologies, flexible infrastructure, and adaptable systems provide option value—they're useful across multiple scenarios, not just the one you're preparing for.

The Surveillance Challenge

Pandemic surveillance presents a particularly difficult Pascal's Wager: continuous investment in monitoring systems that may detect threats early, but also raise privacy concerns and may never find anything significant.

Wastewater surveillance, genomic sequencing, and global disease monitoring networks can provide early warning of emerging pathogens. But they require ongoing funding, international cooperation, and acceptance of some privacy trade-offs. The benefits are invisible until a threat emerges. The costs and concerns are immediate and visible.

This creates a political challenge: it's hard to maintain support for surveillance systems that haven't detected anything alarming. Success looks like wasted money. But the first time you need the system and it's not there, the cost is catastrophic.

The asymmetry suggests investing in surveillance despite the uncertainty. But how much? How intrusive? How global? Pascal's Wager tells us to act, but not how much to invest or what trade-offs to accept.

The Stockpile Problem

Maintaining stockpiles of medical supplies, PPE, and equipment presents another Pascal's Wager challenge: continuous cost for resources that may expire unused, versus catastrophic shortages when crisis strikes.

Pre-pandemic, many countries had reduced or eliminated strategic stockpiles. The supplies were expensive to maintain, often expired before use, and seemed unnecessary during normal times. When COVID-19 hit, the lack of stockpiles contributed to healthcare worker deaths, rationing of care, and delayed response.

The asymmetry is clear in retrospect: maintaining stockpiles would have cost millions annually, but their absence cost billions in emergency procurement, lives lost, and economic damage from delayed response.

But stockpiles face a fundamental challenge: they're most valuable for threats we haven't imagined yet. COVID-19 required different supplies than pandemic flu would have. The next pandemic may require different supplies than COVID-19 did. How do you stockpile for unknown threats?

This suggests a different approach: instead of stockpiling specific supplies, invest in flexible manufacturing capacity that can rapidly produce whatever is needed. This is a meta-wager: betting on adaptability rather than prediction.

The Vaccine Platform Bet

mRNA vaccines represent a successful long-term Pascal's Wager, but they also reveal the challenge of maintaining preparedness. The technology existed before COVID-19, but manufacturing capacity didn't. When the pandemic hit, vaccine production was limited by manufacturing constraints, not scientific knowledge.

This highlights a key insight: it's not enough to develop technology—you must maintain the capacity to deploy it rapidly. This requires ongoing investment in manufacturing infrastructure, trained personnel, and supply chains. All of which cost money continuously, with benefits that only materialize during crisis.

The question for future pandemics: do we maintain surge capacity for vaccine production, therapeutics manufacturing, and testing infrastructure? Or do we accept that the first months of the next pandemic will involve ramping up capacity, as happened with COVID-19?

The asymmetry suggests maintaining some surge capacity. But how much? Enough for what scale of pandemic? The answer depends on probability estimates we can't make with confidence.

The International Coordination Problem

Pandemics don't respect borders. Effective preparedness requires global coordination: surveillance networks, information sharing, equitable vaccine distribution, and coordinated response measures. But international cooperation is difficult to maintain during normal times, and often breaks down during crisis.

This creates a collective Pascal's Wager: individual countries must decide whether to invest in global preparedness, knowing that the benefits depend on other countries also investing. If others don't participate, your investment may be wasted. If you don't participate but others do, you might free-ride on their efforts.

COVID-19 revealed the cost of failed coordination: vaccine nationalism, information hoarding, and uncoordinated travel restrictions. The virus spread globally because preparedness wasn't global. No country could protect itself alone.

The asymmetry suggests that global coordination is worth the investment—the cost of pandemic spread exceeds the cost of prevention by orders of magnitude. But achieving coordination requires overcoming national interests, political differences, and trust deficits. Pascal's Wager tells us what we should do, but not how to overcome the political obstacles.

The Timing Dilemma

One challenge of pandemic preparedness is timing: when do you act on early warnings? Too early, and you waste resources on false alarms. Too late, and the pandemic is already spreading.

This is Pascal's Wager with a deadline. You must decide whether to activate expensive response measures based on incomplete information. If you wait for certainty, it's too late. If you act on every potential threat, you exhaust resources and credibility.

COVID-19 showed the cost of waiting too long. Countries that acted early—implementing testing, contact tracing, and targeted restrictions—fared better than those that waited for certainty. But early action is politically difficult: you're imposing costs for a threat that hasn't materialized yet.

The asymmetry suggests erring on the side of early action. But this requires political systems that can tolerate false alarms, populations that trust public health authorities, and leaders willing to act despite uncertainty. These are social and political challenges, not just technical ones.

Learning from Loss

COVID-19 was a Pascal's Wager we lost. We had warnings, we had time to prepare, and we chose not to invest adequately. The cost was catastrophic—in lives, economic damage, and social disruption.

The question is whether we'll learn the lesson. Are we now investing in preparedness for the next pandemic? Are we maintaining stockpiles, surveillance systems, and surge capacity? Are we funding platform technologies and flexible manufacturing? Are we building international cooperation?

Early signs are mixed. Some investments have been made—mRNA vaccine capacity has expanded, surveillance has improved, and pandemic preparedness has higher political priority. But as the immediate crisis fades, so does political will. Budgets are being cut, stockpiles are being reduced, and attention is shifting to other priorities.

This is the challenge of Pascal's Wager: it's easy to commit to preparation immediately after catastrophe, but hard to maintain that commitment as memory fades and other needs compete for resources. The next pandemic may be decades away. Can we maintain preparedness that long?

The Meta-Wager

Pandemic preparedness is ultimately a meta-wager: a bet not just on the next pandemic, but on our ability to learn from experience and maintain long-term commitments despite short-term pressures.

The asymmetry is clear: preparation costs billions, but pandemics cost trillions. Even if the probability of a pandemic in any given year is low, the expected value overwhelmingly favors investment. COVID-19 proved this empirically.

But knowing we should prepare doesn't mean we will. Political systems favor immediate, visible spending over long-term, invisible protection. Preparedness competes with healthcare, education, and infrastructure. And success—preventing the next pandemic—will look like wasted money.

This is Pascal's Wager at its most challenging: we know what we should do, we know the cost of not doing it, and we may still fail to act. The question isn't whether pandemic preparedness is a good bet—COVID-19 answered that definitively. The question is whether we're capable of taking the bet seriously enough to maintain it over time.

The next pandemic is coming. The only question is whether we'll be ready.

References

[1] Bill Gates, "The next outbreak? We're not ready," TED2015, March 2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready

[2] David M. Cutler and Lawrence H. Summers, "The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus," JAMA, Vol. 324, No. 15, October 2020. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771764

[3] "Moderna's mRNA Platform," Moderna, Inc. https://www.modernatx.com/mrna-technology/mrna-platform-enabling-drug-discovery-development