Whilst the Covid pandemic has killed over five million people worldwide we should not forget that there are worse diseases out there some of which could, in the future become the next pandemic. It only takes some action that nobody would think of having a connection with a disease or some previous viral or bacterial horror to return to cause another pandemic. That key pandemic starting point could be some African villager deciding to eat some wildlife infected with a previously unconsidered disease that then crosses over in to humans or something like multi drug resistant Tuberculosis taking advantage of a world that is both very interconnected and one, where in many Western nations, a laxity about vaccination against TB has taken hold.

There are untold potential horrors lurking in the natural world that previously might have remained hidden and unknown but which only come to light when human development intrudes on the places where disease and disease vectors are endemic. While we are somewhat lucky in that many of the potential pathogens are known about, we cannot be sure that we know all about all of them. After all the big lesson that we should take from something like HIV is that when this disease first appeared we thought we knew all about the sexually transmitted diseases that existed and considered them to be either completely curable or manageable. Sadly the scientific and medical worlds got caught out by a disease that we did not expect or comprehend and which is still with us and still killing people.

There will be another pandemic of that I am sure. It might be something relatively mild and with a low death count as was the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic with less than a million casualties or it might be something of terrifying virulence and mortality such as a more easily spreadable viral haemorragic fever, which in the unlikely event it naturally mutated to become airborne could kill millions. We must not discount the possibility that a rogue nation or terrorist group could modify a virus or a bacterium to make it either more lethal or more easily transmissible as the technology to do this is difficult but not impossible to obtain or build although there are strict export controls in some countries such as the UK on some biohazard handling and preparation equipment .

Another worry is old diseases coming back. Although the CDC are confident that there is little risk of a disease like Smallpox coming back via bodies long buried in the permafrost or in other conditions that might be conducive to viral preservation, there is a slim chance that they might be wrong. What keeps me up at night is what happens if a nation like North Korea managed to find and manufacture Smallpox and weaponised it? Then we would have a disease with a 30% death toll stalking the world and where nobody under fifty has been vaccinated against it.

When we are confronted with the next pandemic, let us for the sake of this article call this hypothetical disease ‘Novelpox’, then there will be a need for governments to act against it. But in order for such a disease to be properly tackled there will be a need for people’s to have trust in their governments and their policies for handling such an outbreak.

Unfortunately the way that various governments have handled Covid has damaged that trust. Confused messaging about Covid along with policies that have been seen by some as authoritarian and as in the case of lockdowns, might be seen to have brought more damage to societies than the disease itself has destroyed trust.

Governments who have reached for the weapon of censorship rather than dragging the purveyors of misinformation out into the open and debating with them and ultimately defeating them has also in my opinion damaged confidence in government messaging about Covid. The Ivermectin grifters for example might have been better dealt with by putting them up against proper scientists in public debate and defeating their ideas in the marketplace of ideas rather than by censoring them. All that has resulted from this policy is that those inclined to be suspicious of government, of which there are a lot already, are cleaving ever more strongly to the Ivermectin grifters on the grounds that if the government are censoring them then they must be onto something.

The multiple examples of hypocrisy from governments over Covid has really not helped matters either. The many times that government figures have been seen at events unmasked right up until the press arrive along with the various ‘Partygate’ incidents have not helped with the trust issue. All politicos both from the Left and the Right have been implicated in incidents of covid hypocrisy and that hypocrisy plays very badly with those who have lost jobs or had businesses destroyed or have missed out on life events because of covid restrictions that appear to apply only to the little people and not to the elites.

When the big one in pandemic terms hits, either something we know about or possibly my hypothetical ‘Novelpox’ then in order to tackle the disease governments are going to need the public on side and on side quickly. I believe that this course of action might be much more difficult now that trust in government has been squandered by how they’ve dealt with Covid.

Let’s say that five or ten years down the line we get something like ‘Novelpox’ suddenly spring up. Because of the arrival of this disease there is a need to administer mass medication whether that be vaccines, antibiotics or antivirals in order to do that and impose some non-pharmaceutical interventions in order to control the spread of ‘Novelpox’.

With widespread trust in government and trust in government advisors it should be easy or relatively easy to do this and ‘Novelpox’ might be dealt with pretty quickly. The problem is many people will still remember the confused messaging, the unnecessary authoritarianism, the economic damage and the dishonesty and hypocrisy of government in relation to Covid and therefore not trust the government over their plans for dealing with ‘Novelpox’. In that situation a disease like ‘Novelpox’ might not be taken seriously until a large portion of the country see this disease in their own backyards. It might take a great loss of life from ‘Novelpox’ before people started to trust their governments over this disease.

My worry is that because of the mistakes that have been made over Covid and the hypocrisy and malfeasance of some politicians along with the woeful state of science education in places like the United Kingdom (14^th in PISA rankings for science) and the United States (38% of Americans are strict believers in Creationism) such factors may make tackling a future pandemic much more difficult. In order to be ready for the next pandemic countries like the UK and the USA need to tackle problems such as the honesty and transparency of politics and the scientific advice given to politicians and the woeful levels of science literacy among the general population. Politicians who have squandered the trust that they once had from the public and a population so science ignorant that they readily believe pseudoscientific woo are going to be no help whatsoever when the next, possibly extremely lethal pandemic hits.