Next virus may be more lethal, Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine inventor Sarah Gilbert warns

Sarah Gilbert urges that advances made in research ‘must not be lost’, cautioning this ‘won’t be the last time a virus threatens our lives’.

Dame Sarah Gilbert, one of the inventors of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, has issued a warning about future pandemics. Picture: Supplied

Another pandemic could prove to be both more contagious and more lethal, one of the inventors of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine warned on Sunday.

Dame Sarah Gilbert said that scientific advances made in viral research “must not be lost”, as the former prime minister Tony Blair urged the international community to “organise global genomic sequencing” to act faster on new variants and boost jab delivery worldwide.

Gilbert, delivering the 44th Richard Dimbleby Lecture, said: “This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods. The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both.

“We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness. The advances we have made, and the knowledge we have gained, must not be lost.”

Gilbert is credited with having saved millions of lives through her role in designing the coronavirus vaccine, now in use in more than 170 countries. She has been making and testing vaccines for more than ten years, mainly using antigens from malaria and influenza, and initiated the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine project in early 2020 when Covid-19 first emerged in China. She said that even if vaccines offered reduced protection against the new Omicron variant this would “not necessarily mean reduced protection against severe disease and death” but added: “Until we know more, we should be cautious, and take steps to slow down the spread of this new variant.”

Blair told The World This Weekend on BBC Radio 4 that the international community should work together to agree a set of travel standards and restrictions and to organise mass vaccination in all countries, describing it as “the only route out”.

He said: “If you’ve got large populations that are unvaccinated, it’s likely to mutate faster and further. The failure to organise mass vaccination globally has been a huge problem right throughout this crisis. So I think even at this stage it’s possible to change course but we need to have it organised and so now it’s not just going to be about the supply of vaccines.

“I think over the coming weeks and months we’ll have a large supply of vaccine flowing even to Africa, but we will have to organise the distribution, the logistics and absolutely vitally we’ve got to organise global genomic sequencing so that we know what’s happening in countries.”

Gilbert’s lecture will be broadcast on BBC1 on Tuesday, December 7 at 9.35am (AEDT). It will also be available on iPlayer.

The Times