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Global organizations are working to build a permanent, globally-controlled state of readiness for the coming of the heralded “Disease X.”
Speaking at a World Economic Forum (WEF) seminar called “Preparing for Disease X,” World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that in 2018 his organization “needed to have a placeholder for the disease we don’t know.
“And that was when we gave the name Disease X,” he said on Jan. 17. “We were preparing for Covid-like diseases, and you may even call Covid the first Disease X.”
Since then, global organizations such as the WHO, the WEF, the World Bank, the G7, and the G20 have been working to build a global infrastructure to fight the next pandemic, in whatever form it takes.
The ‘100 Days Mission’
To cope with the spread of such viruses, the Norway-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was created at the WEF’s 2017 Davos summit as a self-described “global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organizations.”
In 2022, CEPI partnered with McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy, to produce its “100 Days Mission” for accelerating vaccine production.
According to this report, it took between 326 and 706 days “from the day the COVID-19 sequence was made available until emergency use authorization by a stringent regulatory authority or issuance of an Emergency Use Listing by the World Health Organization.”
CEPI’s plan would make vaccines available within 100 days, during which time “non-pharmaceutical interventions” would be employed to slow the disease’s spread.
During COVID-19, non-pharmaceutical interventions included testing, contact tracing, social distancing, surveillance, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and bans on gathering for family events or church services.
In the 100-day plan, scientists would accelerate the timeline by leveraging technology from existing vaccines, “combining different trial phases into one trial to accelerate enrollment,” and “deploying platform trials, such as “WHO’s Solidarity,” in which hundreds of hospitals in dozens of countries collaborate to assess the vaccine’s risks and benefits.
