“Disease X”: What do we know about this fictional virus that rocked the Davos Summit and the Complosphere?
The Davos Economic Forum is hosting a roundtable this Wednesday around “Disease X”: the objective, to prevent and better prepare for future pandemics around the world. Complosphere actors, for their part, assure that the World Health Organization and other international health actors are preparing for new pandemics.
A virus with a mysterious name quoted in the program of one of the most famous international forums in the world. And, in the background, four years of the Kovid-19 pandemic… nothing less was needed to provoke the Complosphere: it accuses the main players of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) of “preparing” the next pandemic. A question about an unknown virus called “Disease X” during the workshop.
“Incredible and very revealing,” says Florian Philippot, president of Les Patriotes party, sharing the contents of the roundtable on the web.
The former MEP claims that the workshop was organized only to “instill fear”. On the Web, singer Francis Lalanne, who has become a figure among conspiracy theorists, willingly shares information, believing that the authorities are creating “voluntary rat breeding” with the sole aim of spreading the “plague.”
List of diseases compiled by WHO
What is it really? In its program, the Davos Economic Forum is hosting a roundtable this Wednesday, January 17, centered around the question of “Disease X”.
Some actors must participate in the exercise: this is the case, among others, of the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Minister of Health Nicia Trindade of Brazil and the President of Michel Demarre of Switzerland, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Board of Directors of AstraZeneca Laboratories. The stated objective of this roundtable: to discuss and talk about “the efforts needed to prepare health systems for the multiple challenges that await them”.
In short, it is a question of discussing measures if a potentially dangerous virus were to re-spread the world.
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The organizers of the forum thus list a whole set of diseases known today that may be the subject of a more active circulation on our planet: we have among others the Ebola virus, the Zika virus, the now famous Kovid-19… and this famous “Disease X”.
In practice, it was discovered by the World Health Organization in 2018: since then, it appears in the list of priority diseases and pathogens for research and development drawn up by the WHO. By developing this list of potentially dangerous viruses, health authorities primarily want to prioritize research. The list “does not even indicate possible causes of future epidemics”, the WHO explains on its website.
Disease X, a concept
But in concrete terms, what do we mean by “disease X”? It’s hard to describe because it…exists only in theory. It is actually a fictitious virus, a concept developed by the WHO to best prepare health systems worldwide for the emergence of a potentially dangerous disease.
“The risk of future outbreaks is driven by multiple factors, including climate change, ecosystem change and increasing urbanization. The next disease in the magazine WHO Science In 2021.
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In a presentation made in 2022, the World Health Organization estimated that 631,000 to 827,000 viruses could infect humans today. This virus may contain the so-called “disease X”.
According to researchers, it may be a zoonotic disease (transmitted from animals to humans). The organizers of the Davos Economic Forum described that hypothetically, the disease could cause “20 times more deaths than Covid-19”. Hence the question of preparing health workers for the possibility of the spread of such viruses: this is also the whole purpose of the scientific framework that the World Health Organization wants to develop at this time. The year 2024.
