Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic.[4][5] The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen (e.g. broader vaccines and manufacturing facilities).[4][6] Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious DiseasesAnthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses (e.g. flaviviruses), instead of just individual strains (e.g. zika virus), thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains.[7] In 2020, it was speculated, including among some of the WHO's own expert advisors, that COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, met the requirements to be the first Disease X.[1][2][3]
Jonathan D. Quick, author of End of Epidemics, described the WHO's act of naming Disease X as "wise in terms of communicating risk", saying "panic and complacency are the hallmarks of the world's response to infectious diseases, with complacency currently in the ascendance".[16]
In March 2020, The Lancet Infectious Diseases published a paper titled "Disease X: accelerating the development of medical countermeasures for the next pandemic", which expanded the term to include Pathogen X (the pathogen that leads to Disease X), and identified areas of product development and international coordination that would help in combatting any future Disease X.[24]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_X
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