In 2014, as more than eleven thousand people were dying of Ebola across West Africa, the president of the World Bank had an idea. Jim Yong Kim knew that it could take months to find funding whenever a pandemic cropped up. He proposed a market solution: pandemic bonds. The idea was to bring catastrophe to finance, making disease response something investors could bet on.

First issued by the World Bank in 2017, these bonds turned global health emergencies into high-stakes financial instruments. Unlike a savings bond that an eleven-year-old might receive from a grandparent, these were speculative bets, backed by deep-pocketed investors like the Swedish state pension fund. Those investors would put down a principal, and if a pandemic had not occurred after three years, they would get their money back with interest. (That bond interest was paid for by “investor countries” like Japan and Germany, who gave taxpayer grants to the World Bank.) In the first and only iteration of the bonds, $320 million was raised. If a pandemic did occur, then the bond would be paid out to poor countries to cover the subsequent costs of the public health response.

If state funds weren’t enough, and if donations couldn’t bridge the gap, then this new instrument would create a way for the private sector to fund global pandemic response — something traditionally done by governments. It wouldn’t be hampered by a state bureaucracy, Kim promised. Instead, it would move sleekly across the free market. At one point, he claimed that the principal from the bonds could be disbursed in as few as eight hours. When a global pandemic eventually did strike in 2020, it took four and a half months for any of the bonds to pay out.