Is another pandemic really inevitable?

Future pandemics as bad as Covid are ‘a certainty’, says Sir Chris Whitty. He is right in one sense. So many people gained so much money, power or fame out of the pandemic that they will be all too willing to declare another one soon. The WHO is trying to vastly increase its budget and its powers on the back of Covid.

But if he means that we face more outbreaks of new infectious diseases that go global, then no, Whitty is wrong. The chances of another new virus spreading through the human race at a terrifying rate, burning through every barrier we erect – lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, vaccines – as happened in 2020, are small. The enthusiasm with which epidemiologists have tried to scare us about monkey pox and bird flu are cases in point: they are very nasty diseases but are unlikely to go global if we are careful.