Sir John Bell argues for a global genomic surveillance system to thwart pandemics

OUR ABILITY to identify and track pathogens that cause disease outbreaks is flawed. Take covid-19. At the start of the pandemic it took weeks to discover the disease was caused by a new coronavirus. This slowed the development of vaccines and testing platforms. Emerging evolutionary variants caused dismay, even though it is well understood that every virus evolves in this way. And identification of these variants was haphazard as only a few sites with modern surveillance and genetic-based sequencing techniques could do so. Patchy sequencing efforts led to missed opportunities to identify new variants and to understand the evolving epidemic. Fortunately the speed of development of new vaccines that have proved effective against all variants rescued us but it may not always work this way.