Pandemic prevention

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (February 2021) This article is missing information about the history of pandemic prevention, the history of the types of measures, on programs and organizations that are involved in pandemic prevention and on vaccination and antibodies in the context of pandemic prevention. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (March 2020) This article needs to be updated. The reason given is: Needs to reflect developments in response to COVID-19. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (August 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Pandemic prevention is the organization and management of preventive measures against pandemics. Those include measures to reduce causes of new infectious diseases and measures to prevent outbreaks and epidemics from becoming pandemics.

It is not to be mistaken for pandemic preparedness or mitigation (e.g. against COVID-19) which largely seek to mitigate the magnitude of negative effects of pandemics, although the topics may overlap with pandemic prevention in some respects.

Some biosafety and public health researchers contend that certain pandemic prevention efforts themselves carry risk of triggering pandemics (e.g. wildlife virus sampling), though not engaging in any form of sampling also carries the risk of being unprepared for future spillover events and being unaware of future pandemic pathogens.