they just wont Stop

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/sep/22/disease-x-hunting-the-next-pandemic-review-an-hour-of-pure-terror

Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic review – an hour of pure terror

Dr Chris van Tulleken learns that Covid-19 was nothing compared to what’s coming to wipe us out. Still, at least he’s like a jolly old uncle as he delivers the bad news

Lucy Mangan

Mon 22 Sep 2025 17.00 EDT

‘Humanity has three great enemies: fever, famine and war. Of these, by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” Thus spake the revered physician Sir William Osler, and thus quoteth Dr Chris van Tulleken at the start of this hour-long trip into terror, entitled Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic. Buy your bunker and pack your go-bag as you watch.

Van Tulleken is an associate professor at University College London, a practising doctor in infectious diseases and a tremendously affable sort, committed to making complex medical matters accessible to a wide audience. This makes his documentary about where and what the next pandemic virus will be (“It’s out there, trying to get into the human population every day”) a strangely jolly while utterly comfortless watch. I guess a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine – and contemplation of an existential threat – go down.

So, what do we know? The short answer is: too much, and not enough. With the help of experts, Van Tulleken takes us through the sprawling virus families that give us the likes of Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, yellow fever, avian flu and Covid-19 (the last of which “may have been just a warning shot”), the means by which viruses can jump species, and how they could mutate to become the one that takes us all out. In other words, it would be worse than the bubonic plague, which is estimated to have killed 50% of the European population back in the day. Worse, too, than the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, which killed more people than the first world war. And worse, too, than Covid, that “warning shot” from a global armoury stuffed with uncountable numbers of potentially fatal viruses, which has killed more than7 million peopleworldwide since it emerged in 2019…