How Pandemic Bonds Became the World’s Most Controversial Investment

In late January 2015, just after the deadliest outbreak of Ebola in history, then-World Bank President Jim Yong Kim stood in front of a group of Georgetown University students and professors to introduce a new approach to fighting pandemics.

Fresh from the annual gathering of power brokers and policy makers in Davos, Kim described a new type of financial product — “pandemic bonds” — that he hoped would persuade private investors to swell the World Bank’s coffers. Quoting former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Kim said: “Investing in health is the right thing to do ethically and morally, but it's also the right thing to do if you can do basic arithmetic.”