Leading scientist predicts the next Covid-like pandemic will hit in within 15 years

Leading scientists have warned that it’s 'not a question of if but when' the next pandemic hits and that the UK is unprepared.

It comes as virologists told The Independent that the new Covid-19 variant with a rare symptom, XBB.1.16 or Arcturus, may become more aggressive and the dominant strain in Britain.

At the same time, the rapid spread of the H5N1 bird flu strain is also sparking fears. While only a small number of people have been infected so far and there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission, scientists and governments worry that the virus may be mutating in ways that could make it spread more easily.

London-based Airfinity Ltd. said that if a bird flu-type virus mutated to allow human-to-human transmission, it could kill as many as 15,000 Brits in one day.

Covid-like pandemic could occur in next 10-15 years

Sir John Bell, a leading immunologist and a member of the UK’s Covid vaccine task force during the pandemic, said it was easy for people to disregard Covid-19 as a 'once in a generation crisis'.

Writing in The Independent, Bell warned that it is 'a question of when, not if, another pandemic strikes'. He cites research that suggests there is a 38% chance that another pandemic will occur within our lifetime, which would have 'the potential to cause even greater destruction'.

Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, who led the 2006 research that closely predicted the Covid-19 pandemic, said it's probable we will experience another virus outbreak on the same scale within 15 years.

However, according to Airfinity Ltd., there’s a 27.5% chance a pandemic as fatal as Covid-19 could happen in the next 10 years. This risk is due to climate change, growth in international travel, increasing populations, and the threat of zoonotic diseases.

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Not doing enough to prepare for another pandemic

Experts have voiced concerns that the UK is not ready for another virus outbreak due to the disbanding of pandemic management processes. As Professor Peter Horby, the lead for the Covid Recovery trial and head of the Pandemic Sciences Institute, said:

What we’ve seen is there has been the discontinuation of funding of some of the jewels in the crown of the UK response, like the ONS survey, like the Covid Geonomics Consortium, like the Recovery trial ... the mothballing of the [Covid lab] facilities... and I find that a potential risk for the future.

King agreed, saying:

That’s what the pandemic in 2020 proved: that we had jettisoned all of the processes that would have managed the epidemic. I see no signs of this being reversed at the moment.

If you wait for the next epidemic, which I think is where the government may be now – if you wait until the next vaccine is developed, for whatever disease that is, it will take months and months for that vaccine to arrive. We cannot rely on that. We will have many, many cases, it’ll get really out of hand again, and then we’ll have hospitals completely overwhelmed by an outbreak of this kind.

Horby similarly warned:

We may be back in the position that we saw ourselves in 2020, where we’ve got a new threat and we don’t have the diagnostics, the drugs, the vaccine, or the surveillance capabilities that we would desire.

Indeed, as Airfinity Ltd. points out, many high-risk pathogens such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Zika virus lack approved vaccines or treatments. In addition, current surveillance policies are not likely to identify a new pandemic quickly enough.

According to the firm, if effective vaccines are rolled out 100 days following the discovery of a new pathogen, the probability of a life-threatening pandemic drops from 27.5% to 8.1%.

Sources used:

Independent: 'Top scientists warn ‘the next pandemic is coming and we’re not ready’'

Bloomberg: 'Another Covid-Like Pandemic Could Hit the World Within 10 Years'