In the longer term, we hope that the global health security community examines bigger-picture methodological issues around health security metrics. Many commonly used indicators of health security capacity—including those featured in the GHS Index, JEE and IHR Monitoring and Evaluation Framework—reflect a highly technocratic conceptualisation of outbreak prevention, detection and response. This framing likely fails to account for many social, institutional and cultural determinants of health system functioning and population health.