Just five years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is at risk from another pandemic. It could be caused by a known virus or by a completely new agent, what scientists call pathogen X.
This is the warning of the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, made public in a video on the occasion of the Mastering Immunity 2025 conference held in Singapore.
"The question is not whether pathogen X will emerge, but whether we will be ready when it does," he stressed, calling for a global commitment to strengthening health preparedness.
The WHO chief reiterated the importance of expanding research using prototype pathogens that can mimic the behavior of viral families to understand modes of transmission and containment strategies. According to the World Health Organization, developing collaborative and geographically distributed research is also essential.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recalled that at this year's World Health Assembly, countries adopted the historic WHO agreement on pandemics, an international legal instrument that provides binding commitments to strengthen research, development, and equitable access to vaccines and medical measures against pandemics.
Among the initiatives launched, he mentioned the mRNA technology program in South Africa, launched in 2022 and which is now shared with a network of 15 partner countries.
The WHO, he concluded, is working to promote open research consortia that bring together scientists, developers, funders and regulators, with the aim of accelerating the development of tools against future pandemic threats./La Repubblica
