VIDEO - Covid expert warns NEW pandemic is coming and claims millions more will die

A new pandemic could strike at any moment, the woman responsible for the UK's Covid vaccination rollout has warned.

Dame Kate Bingham, who has responsible for procuring the jabs used to inoculate the population against the last health crisis, has urged governments around the world to prepare for an unknown disease to suddenly rear its head.

Writing in a national newspaper this morning, she said the world may need to once again provide mass vaccinations.

"The next major pandemic is coming. It’s already on the horizon, and could be far worse — killing millions more people — than the last one," she wrote.

WATCH: WHO warns 'we must prepare' for next pandemic

Dame Kate Bingham said the exact form of the new virus is still unknown

PA

She warned in the Daily Mail: "To combat Disease X — as the World Health Organisation ominously calls it — we will once again need vaccines to be engineered and delivered in record time.

"But, as things stand, there is absolutely no guarantee that will happen.

"By contrast, we may well look back at the Covid-19 crisis as a walk in the park — and of course it was nothing of the kind."

While admitting that there was no known virus that was of particular concern at present, Bingham said that it was the very fact that the next threat was unknown that should concern governments the most.

"So far, scientists are aware of 25 virus families, each of them comprising hundreds or thousands of different viruses, any of which could evolve to cause a pandemic," she said.

"Worse still, they estimate there could be more than one million undiscovered viruses which may be able to jump from one species to another, mutate dramatically and kill millions of human beings."

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, the UK Government set up the UK Health Security Agency which is responsible for public health protection and infectious disease capability.

It is tasked with "protecting every member of every community from the impact of infectious diseases, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents and other health threats".