UK scientists preparing for ‘next pandemic’ by developing vaccine for unknown ‘disease X’

U.K. scientists at a government’s high-security Porton Down laboratory complex in Wiltshire, England have begun developing vaccines for a potential future pandemic.

Two-hundred scientists are currently working on vaccines against an unknown “Disease X” according to a Sky News report.

The high-security laboratory was a testing facility for injections against new COVID variants, and “they are now extending that work, to account for what might be the next pandemic,” Sky News reporter Thomas Moore stated in a video report.

“They don’t know what it will be, a virus or bacteria, or some other pathogen, so it’s just called disease X,” Moore explained.

Bird flu is considered the most likely candidate to cause the “next pandemic” by the scientists working at the lab. They are furthermore developing vaccines against a potential outbreak of monkey pox and Hantavirus , a disease that primarily occurs in rodents and can cause varied disease syndromes in people worldwide.

The laboratory reportedly successfully developed “the world’s first vaccine against Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, a disease that’s spread by ticks and has a fatality rate of 30%.” The tropical disease is viewed as a potential global pandemic threat as it is allegedly becoming more common in Europe due to “climate change,” according to Moore’s report.

“They are scanning the horizon for threads to try and develop vaccines that might be needed in the future,” the Sky News journalist said. “They’ll have them on the shelf if you like, if there is an outbreak, they can take them down and develop a vaccine within a hundred days. Now bear in mind that it took 360 days to develop a COVID vaccine and that was extraordinarily quick. Next time, they are going to go quicker still, because COVID really taught us, that a pandemic can spread around the globe very quickly.”

Professor Jenny Harries, head of the U.K. Health Security Agency, told Sky News that developing a vaccine within 100 days “would be unheard of.”

“It would normally take five or 10 years,” Harries said. “For COVID it was around 360 days. So this is a really high ambition. But for some viruses, it is definitely possible.”