The World Health Organization has concluded Exercise Polaris II, a two-day high-level simulation that brought together 26 countries and territories, 600 health emergency experts, and more than 25 international partners to test collective readiness for the next major global health emergency.

The exercise, which took place on April 22 and 23, was built around a fictional scenario involving a new and dangerous bacterium spreading rapidly across the world.

Each participating country activated its national emergency coordination structure and operated under real-life conditions, sharing information, aligning policies, and surging its workforce mirroring exactly what would be required in a genuine outbreak.

The drill marked a significant expansion from its predecessor, Exercise Polaris I, held in April 2025, which had centred on a fictional virus rather than a bacterium and involved fewer participants.

Among the countries that took part were Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, Nepal, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Uganda and Ukraine, alongside several others as observers. Supporting organisations included the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Médecins Sans Frontières, UNICEF, the Robert Koch Institute, and UK-Med, reflecting the breadth of global cooperation the exercise was designed to test.

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus used the occasion to stress that no nation can manage a pandemic in isolation. He said the exercise demonstrated that global cooperation is not a luxury but an absolute necessity, describing it as proof that collective action works when countries commit to it. Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, added that the exercise embodied the spirit of the Global Health Emergency Corps a standing, coordinated emergency workforce designed to be ready to deploy wherever and whenever it is needed.

Exercise Polaris II forms part of HorizonX, WHO’s broader multi-year simulation programme, which aims to make pandemic preparedness a continuous and evolving commitment rather than a periodic drill. With the memory of COVID-19 still fresh and the threat of new pathogens ever-present, the organisation has made clear that the question is not whether another pandemic will come, but whether the world will be ready when it does.