Preventing pandemics before they start A new international task force is aimed at stopping new diseases like COVID-19 from spreading from animals to humans. “The conversation on prevention is entirely about vaccines and diagnostics and drugs and improving health systems, which are all critically important, but they’re missing the fundamental problem here, which is that we’re driving these pathogens into people through our actions that are destroying nature,” said Bernstein in a May 20, 2021, WBUR article. “And if we fail to address that, we can spend all the money in the world on tests and treatments and vaccines and still go through the year we had.”