The next pandemic could be even more deadly than Covid, a Government scientific adviser has warned as he said the U.K. needs to be better prepared for a future health crisis. The Mail has more.
Professor Mark Woolhouse said the coronavirus outbreak, which killed at least 227,000 in the U.K., was potentially nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
The epidemiologist told the Covid Inquiry the U.K. made a mistake in preparing only for an influenza pandemic rather than hedging bets across a multitude of different outbreaks, including coronavirus.
Professor Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Infections group on Modelling (SPI-M) which advised Government during the pandemic, said he did not want to cast himself as a “doom-monger”, but warned the next outbreak could be far worse.
He told the inquiry in London: “I hope this doesn’t sound too shocking, but on the scale of potential pandemics, Covid was not at the top and it was possibly quite far from the top.
“It may be that next time — and there will be a next time, I don’t know when, it may be quite some time in the future — we will be dealing with a virus that is much more deadly, and is also much more transmissible, in which case actually the things we did to control Covid wouldn’t work anyway.
“I am not sitting here as a doom-monger saying this is going to happen soon, but I am confident enough to tell Government that this is something you should be concerned about, you should be prepared for.
“The next pandemic could be far more difficult to handle than Covid was, and we all saw the damage that that pandemic caused.”
The inquiry, which is in its fourth week, has repeatedly heard from scientists and politicians that the U.K. failed to prepare for a pandemic other than the strict parameters of a flu-like outbreak.
Professor Woolhouse said this strategy was like betting on just one horse at the Grand National.
They just can’t help themselves with their fearmongering and endless ‘pandemic preparedness’, can they. And Mark Woolhouse had been one of the better ones, telling the Government last year that “most of the people who died in the first wave got infected during lockdown” and “lockdowns were not a proportionate or sustainable intervention and the forthcoming inquiry needs to take a critical view of their role”.
Well, this was your chance, Mark. So why are you instead telling the inquiry to make preparations to ‘control’ deadlier and more contagious diseases?
The truth is there has not been a global outbreak of disease that killed more than a fraction of a percent of the world’s population for over a century. Thanks to modern living conditions and medicine, ‘pandemics’ just aren’t something humanity has to worry about anymore. But that’s not the impression you get from listening to any of these scientists.
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