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Sir Peter leads Oxford University’s Pandemic Sciences Institute (Image: Pandemic Sciences Institute / University of Oxford)
Lockdowns will not be possible again in our lifetimes so Britain must increase its pandemic preparedness to be ready for the next deadly outbreak, a top expert has warned. Sir Peter Horby, director of Oxford University’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, led the landmark Recovery trial, which discovered the world’s first treatment proven to slash the risk of dying from Covid-19.
He told the Express that while lockdowns successfully reduced the virus’s spread and eased pressure on the NHS, they were also “hugely disruptive and have lots of other adverse consequences”. People’s mixed experiences mean “we ought to assume that we would not see that level of compliance” again in future, he added. Sir Peter said: “I’ve got significant doubts that you could ever do that again, not in my lifetime, because of the memories of the people who were very adversely affected by that and the scepticism that’s been present in various forums.
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“So I think we have got to use much smarter social and behavioural interventions, and I think that’s entirely possible.”
Climate change is increasing the risk of pandemics by driving migration of animals and disease-carrying vectors such as mosquitoes.
In January, scientists behind the Doomsday Clock cited this effect (along with the proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories and risk of bio-warfare) as one of the reasons they feared humanity was edging closer to annihilation.
If he had to guess, Sir Peter’s money would be on flu as the next big threat. He said: “There’s this massive diversity of influenza viruses in birds, and the diversity has been increasing over time.
“We’re seeing that now spilling over to domestic animals. We’ve seen it in chickens and cows in the US.
“We know very well that flu viruses move over from those animal populations into humans and cause new pandemics. That’s what happened in 1918 and numerous times since then, but 1918 was the biggest and most devastating.”
People should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the cognitive fallacy that a pandemic will not happen again soon, Sir Peter added. And the epidemiologist warned that despite its devastating effects, Covid could have been far worse.
“The fatality rate was not that high, but what happened was it ripped through the entire population all at once, so you had a very large number of people getting very sick at the same time when they were all naive to that virus,” he said.
“There are much worse viruses out there for sure. You look at the fatality rate of MERS and SARS-1. There are also infections that affect children much more.
“Imagine if we’d had a virus that had predominantly affected children, not the elderly. So I do think you have to remember that it could have been, and can be, a lot worse.”
Recovery was the world’s largest clinical trial for Covid treatments and recruited thousands of patients in UK hospitals. It found that the cheap steroid dexamethasone reduced deaths by up to a third among the most severely ill patients, leading to its use on the NHS.
Sir Martin Landray, the study’s other co-chief investigator, warned earlier this month that the UK had not learned the lessons of that pandemic, with lengthy approval processes in danger of hindering the launch of such life-saving studies in future.
Like his colleague, Sir Peter worries that while our knowledge about how best to respond to such a threat has vastly increased, a lack of infrastructure and investment could leave us vulnerable.
He said the UK was “probably the leading scientific voice in the world on the response to Covid — vaccines, treatments, digital disease control applications, diagnostics, genomics and understanding the structural biology of the pathogen”.
But many of the breakthroughs that helped us combat Covid were “based on a legacy of work that we had done over many years”.
For example, the team behind the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine had previously used the same technology to develop a vaccine against another coronavirus, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
When Covid struck, they were able to “copy and paste” the genetic code for the new virus’s spike protein into their tried-and-tested vaccine platform.
New tools including use of artificial intelligence and computational modelling of pathogens will help develop vaccines and treatments even more quickly in future. But these will only be ready for deployment in a crisis if scientists are supported to continue their work during peacetime.
Sir Peter added: “I think one of the dangers is that people forget that you need ongoing investment between epidemics to take forward the technologies, so that you’re in a better place next time.
“We’re in a difficult time now, lots of competing financial pressures. We’ve just seen in the US cuts to research funding, overseas development funding.
“In the UK, some of the work we do internationally is supported by overseas development funding and that’s being cut and put into defence. So I think we’re in a better position in terms of knowledge, but not in terms of assets and infrastructure.”
Calling for greater support from “a whole group of investors” in the life sciences industry as well as the Government, Sir Peter added: “I’m incredibly proud of what the UK achieved [during the pandemic].
“We ought to sing the praises of the UK. Of course other countries made major contributions as well, but the UK as a whole I think knocked it out of the park and did brilliantly, and we should be really proud of that.”
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