Being ready for Disease X will save trillions

Covid killed about seven million people worldwide. “Disease X” could kill 20 times as many. Covid cost the global economy $16 trillion, according to Resolve to Save Lives, a campaign group backed by the Gates Foundation. The economic cost of Disease X could make that look like small change – but could be contained with a relatively modest annual investment in pandemic resilience of around $120 billion. Disease X is a notional next pandemic given a needlessly alarming name and discussed this week at Davos by the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, among others. He was monstered on the resort’s promenade by conspiracists accusing elites of planning the next pandemic but the truth is it’s obviously smart to plan for it. That to-do list includes mapping global hospital capacity, boosting biosurveillance of animal-born pathogens and biosecurity at airports, and building new vaccine production capacity in developing countries.The AI crowd naturally wants to be heard on this too, and there was a quiet consensus at Davos that, whatever the true origins of Covid, any serious AI regulation should include a ban on training generative AI models on data from gain-of-function research such as that carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.