Kate Kelland is an award-winning global health correspondent formerly at Reuters. She is now chief scientific writer at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in London. During 30 years in journalism, she set the agenda in global health and science coverage. In 2017, she won the London Foreign Press Association Science Story of the Year award for her investigative reporting on the International Agency for Research on Cancer. In 2016, she won the Medical Journalists Association’s Feature of the Year award for a piece on the critical challenge facing the WHO - to heal itself. She was UK winner of the European Health Prize for Journalists in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Foreword by Sir Tony Blair. The former British Prime Minister warns that nations should not forget the risk of pandemics following the recovery from Covid-19

Introduction: Meet Disease X. Disease X is the World Health Organization's term for the next potential big pandemic. Previous examples include Ebola, Zika and SARS. The world has a '100 Days Mission' to combat the next Disease X

1. Prepare to be Scared. Pandemics are increasing in frequency and seriousness. Novel viruses can spread in unusual ways and their growth can be exponential.

2. Prepare to Move Fast. The increasing arrival of new communicable diseases such as SARS, MERS and Zika (not to mention Covid-19) means that the world's countries must be ready to act quickly: 'Making quick, decisive moves in the early stage of a rapidly spreading disease outbreak is a prerequisite for getting ahead of a potential pandemic.

3. Prepare to Take Risks. The necessity of pump priming the development of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies to maximise the chances of effective preventative medicine. Sometimes this money will be wasted; often it will halt the exponential spread of a virus that could wreak devastation on human populations.

4. Prepare to Share. Covid-19 showed that international cooperation is essential to thwart the growth of diseases. Public health leaders such as CEPI's Richard Hatchett devised an internationally fair system for sharing vaccines, COVAX.

5. Prepare to Listen. Governments should listen to health experts who are familiar with the spread of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, Britain's Prime Minister during Covid-19, Boris Johnson, did not listen - or, at least, did not act quickly enough.

6. Prepare to Fail. Many vaccine trials will fail. The search for a vaccine for HIV has, for instance, repeatedly failed. However, the attempts to develop a vaccine for HIV have led to breakthroughs in the development of vaccines for other diseases. Scientific advancement is not linear and requires patience.

7. Prepare to Spend Money. Pandemics cost trillions of dollars. Preventing them through the timely development of vaccines and other preventative measures costs much less. If the world spent a fraction of the money it spends on the military annually (almost $2 trillion in 2020) on public health instead, the world's population would benefit tangibly and manifestly.

8. Prepare for the Next One... Because it's coming.

9. 2027: A Pandemic is Thwarted. Imagining how the 100 Days Mission could work in the future, by assessing an outbreak of a pandemic in Asia in the future

Postscript

Resources and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
End Notes
Index