The article examines the problem of perception and assessment of such a socio-cultural threat as a pandemic in the modern history of the 21th century. The study is premised on an understanding of threats and risks based on the advanced foreign and Russian experience of the last decades. The results obtained consist in representing pandemics and epidemics as a significant socio-cultural threat that is constantly present in the system of global risks and is characterized by certain historical dynamics. It has been shown that the level of assessment of the global risk of pandemics and epidemics decreases as soon as the next pandemic goes into history, which leads to a lack of preparedness at the global level. People tend to continue to assess risks based on intuition and heuristic methods, ignoring data from recent history. The article substantiates the position that the lessons of historical memory can also apply to recent events, in particular with regard to the threat of a pandemic, which is increasingly becoming a reality for all of humanity. It is emphasized that the data on the historical dynamics of pandemics can be useful not only for historians, but also for people and groups working in the field of forecasting and overcoming global threats.