WHO Experts Warn the Next Pandemic Could be "Disease X" and Wipe Out 50 Million People

The COVID-19 pandemic was a huge wakeup call for the entire world. For infectious disease experts it offered a glimpse of what a future, more serious pandemic could look like. In a new book, The Long Shot by Kate Bingham & Tim Hames, the World Health Organization experts warn that the next pandemic could be "disease X" and wipe out 50 million people. 

"The next major pandemic is coming. It's already on the horizon, and could be far worse — killing millions more people — than the last one," they write. "We don't yet know for certain what form it will take — just that its arrival, according to global health experts, is not just a possibility but a probability."

They add that we will likely "look back at the Covid-19 crisis as a walk in the park and that the world was "dangerously unprepared for a global health crisis." 

They warn it is dangerous to be complacent now that "Covid-19 is largely regarded as a routine illness." Scientists "know that it could still mutate into new variants that are more infectious and even better at evading our immune systems."

They add that the virus could mutate and become resistant to all the antiviral drugs and vaccines developed. "But even mutated variants of Covid-19 pale in comparison to the other viral threats out there," they write. 

"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," they added. 

They also point out that it is a virus' job to replicate in as many hosts as possible. "So they are continually mutating and latching on to different animals. In fact, some of the most dangerous viruses — such as smallpox, measles, Ebola and HIV — originated in animals and later became highly transmissible between humans."

"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. So far, scientists are aware of 25 virus families, each of them comprising hundreds or thousands of different viruses, any of which could evolve to cause a pandemic," they write. 

There could be more than one million undiscovered viruses which may be able to jump from one species to another, "mutate dramatically and kill millions of human beings," they write. "Why were we so surprised when Covid-19 struck in 2020? It wasn't as if we were being attacked out of the blue — say, by a giant asteroid or aliens from another planet."

They add that we should have been prepared because "pandemics had been quickening over the past few decades." Covid was "preceded by SARS in 2002–4, H5N1 bird flu in 2004, H1N1 swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014–16 and Zika in 2015–16." However, unlike the other viruses, which were contained, "we certainly can't bank on the next pandemic being easily contained," they add. 

"Imagine Disease X is as infectious as measles with the fatality rate of Ebola. Somewhere in the world, it's replicating, and sooner or later, somebody will start feeling sick," they write. 

They also explain that there are several reasons why pandemics are on the rise. "First, it's increasingly connected through globalisation. Second, more and more people are cramming into cities, where they often come into close contact with others. And third, millions of acres of natural habitat are being destroyed by us each year," making it easier for the virus to jump from host to host. "Because massive loss of habitat is pushing animals into ever closer proximity to different species — including us. It's a virus's idea of paradise."

They write that "putting money on the table," is a key way to protect ourselves from a future pandemic. "That's why we need to discover — in advance of the next pandemic — a collection of different prototype vaccines for every threatening virus family that we know about. We'd then have a head start — because we'd be able to engineer those vaccines to target the very specific features of Disease X."