Research Centre Aims To Nip Next Pandemic In The Bud

Porton Down in Wiltshire has had a long history as a top government research centre, often carrying out secret research into chemical and biological weapons as a means of helping defend the UK population against their potential use.

However, the role has expanded into wider research into all sorts of pathogens, including potential and actual pandemic-causing diseases. Now, the site has become the host of the new Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre, which aims to build on the role its scientists played during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The plan is not just about trying to develop variant-tackling Covid-19 vaccines, but to be able to develop new vaccines for a pandemic even before it has begun, such as a potential spill-over event from the H5N1 bird flu that has been ravaging avian populations across the globe.

It is also concerned with a possible ‘disease X’ – a pathogen that emerges suddenly in the way Covid did, and disease-resistant superbugs.

Commenting that Covid was “not a one-off,” UK Health Security Agency chief executive Dame Jenny Harries said: “We say it [Covid] was the biggest public health incident for a century, but I don’t think any of us think it’ll be a century before the next.”

The lab instruments used at Porton Down are hardly likely only to be in use there. Many other laboratories across the UK and beyond will be involved in similar research, sharing data and collaborating on projects. Finding ways to react very quickly to an emerging threat could be crucial in stopping a repeat of the widespread death and disruption of 2020-21.

Historians generally regard the last major global pandemic before Covid to be the 1918-19 influenza outbreak, originally known, inaccurately, as the Spanish Flu, due to the fact the country was not at war and reported cases more freely than other badly-affected nations.