A global genomic surveillance system to thwart pandemics

John Bell

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.

Countries able to detect new variants, however, were hardly rewarded for doing so. Border controls and economic difficulties followed; equity of access to the vaccines and antivirals that might emerge from shared information did not. Worse, these countries gained notoriety after variants were commonly named after them—despite the lack of globally representative data to demonstrate where the variants had really emerged from. Variants supposedly came from Kent in Britain, India and South Africa. Actually some of these places were just doing more sequencing than others.