When the next virus arrives, will reality still matter? By John Kato

The next pandemic will not begin in a laboratory, a wet market, or a remote forest. It will begin in our heads. Or more precisely, in the fractured, paranoid, algorithm-fed echo chambers we now mistake for public discourse. Viruses mutate, yes but so does misinformation, and it does so faster, cheaper, and with far fewer ethical constraints.

We are already living in a rehearsal. Anti-vaccine movements, conspiracy theorists, and self-styled “free thinkers” have moved from the fringes to the front row of political power, especially in the United States and increasingly across Europe. What was once an odd Facebook group is now a voting bloc. What was once a YouTube rant is now public policy. And the terrifying question is not whether another pandemic will come, but whether society will still be capable of responding to it in any coordinated, rational way.

During the last pandemic, we discovered something unsettling: a significant portion of the population does not merely distrust institutions; it actively rejects the concept of shared reality. Masks were not a public health tool but a symbol of oppression. Vaccines were not medical interventions but secret plots. Death tolls were dismissed as fake numbers, while exhausted doctors were accused of being actors. Science was not debated, it was replaced.

And instead of shrinking after the crisis, this mindset hardened. Conspiracy thinking is no longer reactive; it is preemptive. For many people, the next pandemic is already “planned,” already “fake,” already the fault of whoever they dislike most. This means that when the next real threat emerges, facts will arrive late to a battlefield already occupied by lies.

So what the hell are we going to do? First, we must abandon the comforting illusion that better facts alone will save us. We tried that. Charts, studies, press conferences, dashboards, none of them stopped people from believing that a global health emergency was an elaborate hoax coordinated by enemies who somehow can’t run a functional post office. The problem is not a lack of information. It is a lack of trust, and trust cannot be downloaded as a PDF.

Second, we need to confront the role of political opportunism. Anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric didn’t spread because it was convincing; it spread because it was useful. Fear mobilizes voters. Outrage generates clicks. Confusion buys time. Leaders who knowingly fueled distrust for short-term gain should not be treated as misguided participants in a debate. They are arsonists complaining about smoke.

Third, public health must stop talking like a corporate memo. During crises, institutions default to sterile language, legal disclaimers, and cautious half-sentences designed to offend no one and therefore persuade no one. Meanwhile, conspiracy narratives are emotional, simple, and personal. If science continues to sound like an instruction manual while lies sound like a story, stories will win.

But let’s be honest: none of this fixes the core issue. The real problem is that modern democracies are built on the assumption of a shared baseline of reality. You can argue about values, priorities, and trade-offs but not about whether gravity exists. Once that baseline collapses, collective action becomes almost impossible.

A pandemic requires solidarity. It requires people to accept inconvenience for strangers they will never meet. That is a hard sell in a culture trained to see every request as an attack on personal freedom and every expert as a potential enemy. The next virus will not need to be deadlier than the last one. It will only need to arrive in a more cynical, more polarized, more distrustful world.

And that world is already here. So what do we do? We stop pretending this is just a medical problem. It is a social one, a political one, and a cultural one. We regulate the information ecosystem with the same seriousness we regulate water and food. We teach critical thinking as a survival skill, not an academic luxury. We demand accountability from platforms and politicians who profit from confusion. And we accept that freedom without responsibility is not freedom, it is fragility.

Because when the next pandemic comes, the virus will test our immune systems. But misinformation will test whether we still qualify as a society at all.