Britain could roll out vaccines within 100 days of the discovey of a deadly virus, under a new programme designed to stop future pandemics in their tracks.
According to The Times:
Hundreds of scientists have begun work on the high-security project, developing “prototype” vaccines against diseases including bird flu and preparing for any unknown future threat, described as “Disease X”.
The Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre (VDEC), based at the government’s secretive Porton Down site in Wiltshire, is positioning the UK as the global leader in vaccine development.
It is working towards a “100-day mission” to deploy vaccines within three months of a virus being detected in humans.
The new £65 million facility is the only place in the world with the capacity to carry out every stage of vaccine development, from isolating harmful pathogens to quickly conducting clinical trials.
Scientists would be able to test thousands of treatments at the same time to quickly establish which existing drugs are most effective.
The site is operating in partnership with UK universities, the pharmaceutical industry and global health organisations.
More than 200 scientists are working to create libraries of prototype vaccines for virus families seen as the most likely to cause a pandemic, such as influenza.
These vaccines can be tweaked according to the genetic sequence of any deadly new strain by deploying the same mRNA technology used in the Covid jabs made by Pfizer and Moderna.
In their first major breakthrough, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) team at Porton Down have begun clinical trials to test the world’s first vaccine against Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever.
The virus, which is spread by tick bites, is fatal in 30 per cent of cases and is seen as one of the biggest pandemic threats.
Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of UKHSA, said the new centre was created to “stop pandemics happening” by developing a vaccine before a virus spreads too far.
She said: “Previous vaccines would have taken five to ten years to develop. For Covid it was 362 days, so to get to 100 days is really stretching the ambition. But if we’re going to prevent pandemics then that’s exactly what we need to do. We would [now] be better prepared to prevent something escalating . . . We would have prototype vaccines ready.”
Harries said the likelihood of another pandemic was growing due to climate change, urbanisation and global migration, all of which increase the risk of a virus leaping from animals to humans.
“Covid-19 was the biggest public health incident for a century but I don’t think any of us think it will be a century before the next one comes,” she added.
A government analysis of more than 80 threats to Britain identified another pandemic as the greatest danger, suggesting the chances were as high as one in four of a crisis within the next five years that could cause 840,000 deaths.
