© UKHSAProf. Dame Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA)
One of the U.K.'s most secretive centres of scientific research - Porton Down - is aiming to stop the next pandemic "in its tracks".
I have passed through the incredibly tight security at this remote facility to get rare access to its scientists. They are based in the shiny new Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre. Their work builds on the response to Covid, and aims to save lives and minimise the need for lockdowns when a new disease next emerges.
"Covid, of course, is not a one-off," says Prof. Dame Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which runs these laboratories.
"We say it [Covid] was the biggest public health incident for a century, but I don't think any of us think it'll be a century before the next. The combination of climate change, urbanisation and people living closer to animals - the source of many new diseases which transfer to people - means we're facing a 'rising tide of risk.'"
Porton Down - located in the tranquil Wiltshire countryside, near Salisbury - is one of the few places in the world equipped to research some of the nastiest viruses and bacteria you could imagine. The freezers here contain the likes of Ebola.A secret laboratory linked to the Ministry of Defence where they make new variants of Covid, you say? What could go wrong. We're expected to assume, of course, that they only grow existing 'new variants' rather than, as per Pfizer, modified versions. But who's really to say?
Neighbouring buildings include the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (part of the Ministry of Defence), where it was confirmed the nerve agent Novichok has been used in the Salisbury poisonings.
The vaccine laboratories - housed in dark green buildings - were hastily constructed as part of the emergency response to Covid. But, as the intense demands of the pandemic have waned, the focus has shifted.
The new vaccine research centre is concentrating on three types of threat:The aim is to work with the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and doctors to support all stages of vaccine development.
- known infections that are getting harder to deal with, such as antibiotic-resistant superbugs
- potential threats that might cause a problem, including bird flu and new Covid variants
- and 'Disease X' - something unforeseen, like Covid, which takes the world by complete surprise
Porton Down scientists are working on the first vaccine against Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever, which is spread by ticks and kills about a third of those infected. The disease is found in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and in Asia - and could spread further with climate change.
At the other end of the process, vaccine effectiveness is evaluated. It was scientists here who spotted that the Omicron variant could bypass some of the protection afforded by Covid vaccines.
And they are still monitoring new Covid variants by growing them in the laboratory, exposing them to antibodies taken from blood samples and seeing if new variants are still able to infect.
Gallagher reports that the work feeds into the '100 Days Mission' to develop a vaccine against a new threat in super-fast time.
Yet we know that one real possibility is that COVID-19 itself was created as part of and leaked during vaccine research - as Robert Kadlec, Anthony Fauci's old boss, has recently suggested. Not climate change, not animal transfer, but vaccine research. Perhaps we're the ones making the pandemics these days.
Prof. Harries says that in the future we need to be on the front foot and "try and stop" any pandemic before it even begins, or, failing that, to "stop it in its tracks" at its earliest stage.
Sounds absolutely terrifying. They have clearly learned nothing.
Stop Press: A reader reminds me that the 2007 outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease originated with a leak from the Pirbright Institute, one of eight U.K. research institutes supported by the U.K.'s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
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In the early 1960s, Porton Down was asked to expand the scope of their tests to determine if using a live bacterium instead of ZnCds would significantly alter the results. Scientists from Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down selected South Dorset as the site for this next phase of testing, with Bacillus subtilis (also known as Bacillus globigii or BG) selected as the test agent.[1][2] This bacterium was sprayed across South Dorset without the knowledge or consent of the inhabitants.
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