Kate Bingham, who chaired the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce at the beginning of the last pandemic warns the death toll from Disease X could far outweigh Covid-19’s 20 million fatalities
ALAN JOHNSON FROM MIRROR
Global health experts believe the next major pandemic is already on its way – and it could kill millions more than Covid-19. The arrival of Disease X – as it has been dubbed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – is a probability rather than possibility and could hit at any moment.
WHO believes vaccines will need to be created and delivered in a rapid response to combat the disease, but as with the previous pandemic, there is no guarantee this will happen. It adds that its devastating effects are likely to far outweigh that of Covid, which the world was dangerously unprepared for when it hit in early 2020. Kate Bingham, who chaired the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce between May and December that year says we shouldn’t be complacent just because Covid-19 is now “largely regarded as a routine illness”.
The 57-year old Dame warned in the Mail: “Let me put it this way: the 1918–19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I. Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist. Today, there are more viruses busily replicating and mutating than all the other life forms on our planet combined. Not all of them pose a threat to humans, of course – but plenty do.”
Kate revealed that scientists are currently aware of 25 virus families, which each comprise up to thousands of individual viruses that all have the potential to evolve into a pandemic. On top of that, it is estimated that there could be around a million more undiscovered viruses lingering out there which could leap from species to species and have the capability of killing millions of human beings.
She continued: “In a sense, we got lucky with Covid-19, despite the fact that it caused 20 million or more deaths across the world. The point is that the vast majority…
