Swine flu

Imagine if a vaccine for Covid-19 was approved tomorrow, and that within weeks we had all been vaccinated. Would life be able to go quickly back more or less to normal? Don’t bet on it. The long shadow of Covid-19 will mean mass panic every time another novel virus comes to light. Indeed, news of such a virus comes today in a paper by a team from China’s Agricultural University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They say they have identified a flu virus with pandemic potential, which is circulating in the pig population and has already infected significant numbers of humans who work with pigs.