‘It will happen’: Need to prepare for new pandemic and what we’ll likely be hit with next

Another pandemic will sweep the globe in the future, and will likely be a respiratory virus like influenza, a Covid expert has warned.

One of two Melbourne-made Covid vaccines could be mass produced and rolled out across the globe, with the Doherty Institute now in serious talks with a major international vaccine manufacturer.

The Doherty Institute’s Prof Terry Nolan — who led the phase one trial of two Melbourne-made Covid vaccines as a fourth dose booster — on Wednesday revealed data from the first clinical study was now being evaluated, and the results were extremely promising.

The Melbourne University research institute was now in discussions with a major international vaccine manufacturer about its recombinant protein vaccine being rolled out widely, Prof Nolan said.

A total of 76 people took place in the vaccine trial, with 12 people receiving a placebo of water and the others receiving the vaccines at different doses, he said.

There was no evidence of concerning, adverse reactions to the vaccines in the small study, “and certainly nothing dramatic or unexpected”, Prof Nolan said.

The vaccines also appeared to provoke the desired immune responses.

“The rough idea was that both the candidates worked very well against the target receptor … and also a high level of cross protection against Omicron and the other subvariants of Omicron that have subsequently evolved … these viruses are mutating very quickly” he said.

“Both vaccines show very, very encouraging results against the targeted variant and also against other variants which have subsequently evolved.”

The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity is a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

‘It will happen’: Need to prepare for next pandemic

Another pandemic will sweep the globe in the future, and will likely be a respiratory virus like influenza, a Covid expert has warned.

Eminent virologist Professor Paul Young — who co-led an Australian consortium that developed a Covid vaccine candidate in 2020 — on Wednesday said another pandemic was a certainty, and the world needed to be ready to respond.

“It will happen, we can guarantee that, (but) whether it’s a pandemic of the scale we’re currently seeing or smaller epidemic we’re yet to see,” he said.

It would most likely be a flu virus that took hold, in a pandemic of the likes the world had seen before, Prof Young said.

“Respiratory pathogens are the ones that tend to spread out in a pandemic environment more than others. So we’re focusing on those I think … we do need to be more proactive,” he said.

“It’s the species jump from animals … into humans that we’re all worried about, that can’t be predicted with any certainty at all. In terms of the statistical likelihood … influenza remains the one that’s most likely to be among the ones that will come in the future.”

But the world, including Australia, was now better placed to deal with future pandemics, after being forced to develop Covid vaccines at speed and quickly introduce population health safety measures, Prof Young told the panel of Covid experts meeting at Melbourne’s Doherty Institute.

Also speaking at the high-level meeting, architect of the rapidly-developed Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, said scientists were working out how they could go even faster in the development of vaccines and therapeutics, ahead of the next pandemic.

“We still need to do a lot of research in this area, and really what we should be concentrating on is being as prepared as possible,” Prof Gilbert said.

“The more that we can do before any pandemic starts, the better place we are. So we shouldn’t just be thinking about getting ready to move quickly from a standing start, we should be thinking about how much of the work can be done in advance of a new outbreak starting or a new pandemic starting because then we actually have a much better chance of achieving it.

“There’s many, many different factors to that … it’s not just about the vaccines, it’s about diagnostics and about therapeutics. It’s about non pharmaceutical interventions and it’s about the social science studies of how people respond to these interventions, because I think people maybe have changed their views since the (Covid) pandemic as to what they will be prepared to do another time, and we need to kind of re-evaluate how that all works and what research we should be doing in that area as well.”

Lockdowns saved lives

Prof Nolan said there was “no question” Victoria’s severe lockdowns and vaccine mandates saved lives.

“As severe as it was, lockdowns did protect the lives of many and in fact, life expectancy went up in Australia … leaving aside all the contentious issues of compulsory or mandated vaccination, those sorts of things which were very divisive at the time, there was an extraordinary level of compliance from the population with the public health conscious that we had. And there’s no question that it saved many, many lives as a result,” he said.

It comes as the newly released Doherty Institute 2022 Impact Report reveals its figures for last year, showing it had more than 950 staff, 60 research groups, 644 publications, collaborated with 27 countries and had a total income of $147.47m.

Of that total, $55.71m was Australian competitive grant income, $49.62m service income, $18.13m philanthropic donations and $10.09m public sector funding.

Doherty patron Nobel Laureate Prof Peter Doherty said in the report that he had finished his message in the previous year’s impact report by saying “the situation was set for a great public health ‘experiment’ that would tell us how well a population that was heavily vaccinated against an increasingly distant SARS-CoV-2 variant would fare in an increasingly open society”.

“And yes, 2022 was yet another chapter in the long haul that is COVID-19, but one that was very different from the previous two years. As the new year dawned, the ‘experiment’ I referred to had already well and truly played out — Omicron was rampant,” he said.

“Despite tens of thousands of cases being reported daily across Australia, we began to move into a new phase of the pandemic, ‘living with Covid’.

“Every person on the planet has an opinion about the public health measures, vaccine mandates and so forth, that were put in place throughout the pandemic.

“Australia’s Actuaries Institute (Actuaries describe themselves as the nerds of accounting – they go into great depth to analyse a matter to understand and advise on risk) put out a very good report up until the end of 2022. It showed very clearly that the policies pursued here protected large numbers of people. By my calculation, Australia has, in fact, had about a third of the number of deaths that would’ve occurred if, say, we had proceeded in the way the United States and the United Kingdom did.”

Prof Lewin said in the report that while there was increased activity in other areas at Doherty in 2022, Covid research had continued and “culminated in several exciting advances”.

“This type of vaccine research is an excellent example of some of the ambitious focus areas we have prioritised in the Doherty Institute Strategic Plan 2022–2027,” she said.

“Launched in 2022, the Strategic Plan will steer our work during a highly anticipated period of growth and expansion over the next five years.”