Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic.
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World Health Organization on Disease X
The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen (e.g., broader vaccines and manufacturing facilities). Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Anthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses (e.g., flaviviruses), instead of just individual strains (e.g., zika virus), thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains. In 2020, experts, including some of the WHO’s own expert advisors, speculated that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, met the requirements to be the first Disease.
The minimizers, or right-wing and contrarian groups, have desired to do as little as possible regarding COVID-19 and the public-health response to it. On the other side are the maximizers: scientists and their followers who want for the best but prepare for the worst.
In the middle are governments and health organizations attempting to do the right thing, which is unlikely to result in a compromise between minimizers and maximizers. Few governments and organizations have been blameless in their responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, they are aware that any policy or planning changes will be opposed by one or both sides.
The next Pandemic
While there is no clear proof of what will cause the next pandemic, some researchers believe it will be an animal-borne virus. At the India Today Conclave, economist-epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan stated that zoonotic viruses pose a challenge because human bodies have no immune experience with them. “This is just evolution at work.” Disease X could be a fungal germ. If that’s the case, “it might happen right here,” he explained, which is “difficult because there are no immunizations. And we have relatively few medications to treat them with.”
