Science writer David Quammen has long been credited with predicting the Covid-19 outbreak seven years before the pandemic swept the globe.
After interviewing renowned virology and epidemiology experts, he published his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic in 2012.
In it he warned the world’s next pandemic would likely come from a coronavirus spilled over from a wild animal in a wet market – possibly in China. He was spot on.
Now, Quammen is becoming increasingly nervous about the ‘next big one’.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, he claims it’s just a matter of time before another new threat emerges.
His remarks come just as a new coronavirus feared to be powerful enough to spread through humans was discovered in China.
In scenes eerily reminiscent of the beginnings of Covid, researchers at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology detected the new coronavirus strain living in bats.
HKU5-CoV-2 is strikingly similar to the pandemic virus, sparking fears that history could repeat itself just two years after the worst was declared over.
In New York, employees clean cages and take chickens to be slaughtered after an outbreak of bird flu in February
While concerning, Mr Quammen is much more worried about a different virus, however: bird flu.
This, he claims, poses the biggest risk of becoming the next pandemic – and the threat could arrive at any time.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: ‘I have high concerns about bird flu. If you’re going to make a prediction about what would be the next big one now, a scientist would probably say, well, bird flu has the best chance of being our next pandemic virus.
‘But there’s always a lot of randomness built into this because these viruses have high mutation rates and mutation is basically a random process.’
However, he added if these random mutations cause H5N1 bird flu to not only infect humans but also easily transmit from person to person, then the variation would be ‘an extremely dangerous’ virus.
Mr Quammen told the Daily Mail he was concerned about several viruses, including H5N1, malaria and Ebola
Mr Quammen continued: ‘Just the way the Covid virus went from being a rare virus to being a virus in humans and in wildlife all over the planet, that could happen starting tomorrow with bird flu.’
The H5N1 strain of bird flu was first detected in the US in 2022. It has infected 70 people and killed one person.
More than 166million birds have been confirmed to have some strain of the virus and in the last 30 days, the USDA reported 139 flocks have been infected, affecting more than 18.5million birds.
The virus has also been detected in 973 dairy herds, and confirmed among cats, raccoons, skunks, wild dogs, bears, dolphins and cattle.
Human cases can be traced back to contact with infected animals and there is currently no evidence of person-to-person transmission.
Given the variability and unpredictable nature of viruses, Mr Quammen said there is a possibility a global pandemic will never happen.
But he stressed betting on this outcome is like gambling on a roulette wheel.
He told the Daily Mail: ‘It might take four or five mutations of just the right combination to do that, and each of those mutations is a highly improbable event. And the combination of the right four or five is therefore an even more improbable event.’
It is the same as roulette, he explained. The odds of a roulette ball landing on the number and color you bet on are extremely low, and the odds of two roulette balls landing on two numbers and colors you choose are even lower.
But, he warned, if you spin the wheel millions and millions of times, the odds of the balls landing in the right spots go up.
‘And if you spin the wheel a billion times, eventually it will happen,’ he added.
Officials from the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) dispose of culled ducks at a farm in the UK
The above is a summary of the bird flu outbreak in the US in the previous 30 days ending February 27
Mr Quammen continued: ‘Now, what’s happening with bird flu right now is we are spinning the wheel billions and billions of times because this virus is replicating itself by the billions in each individual bird that it infects – probably every day.
‘My sense is this virus is replicating itself around the world continually right now, in millions of wild birds, in probably millions of chickens and in quite a few cows and other mammals.
‘All of those replications, each individual viral replication in each animal, is a spin of the roulette wheel.
‘I’m not saying it’s a certainty that bird flu will be our next pandemic; I’m just saying that it’s a very very distinct possibility.’
In Mr Quammen’s 2012 book, he and experts predicted the next pandemic would come from a novel coronavirus
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has insisted the risk of bird flu to people remains low.
And while Mr Quammen said H5N1 is most likely to spark the next outbreak, he named several other viruses public health officials should actively monitor, including the family of coronaviruses.
If a new strain of coronavirus appeared, it would be a ‘very dangerous signal,’ he warned.
But a new strain appears to have emerged in the form of HKU5-CoV-2.
It was discovered in bats in China and tests showed it infiltrated human cells in the same way as SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid.
Sharing their discovery in the journal Cell, the Beijing-funded researchers admitted it posed a ‘high risk of spillover to humans, either through direct transmission or facilitated by intermediate hosts.’
Additionally, Ebola in Uganda is another virus to be concerned about, with the country recently announcing its eighth Ebola outbreak after a nurse died.
Mr Quammen said: ‘Both of those are very serious events. Ebola is a very horrible disease. It has a high kill rate.
‘It’s very, very unlikely to be the next global pandemic… [but] Ebola is dangerous. If you’re a poor person living in an African village and somebody in the village has it, it’s very dangerous.
‘But it’s not nearly as dangerous to the world.’
Additionally, the World Health Organization reported there have been at least 1,096 illnesses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and 60 fatalities from an outbreak of an unknown disease.
Pictured above are cows that died after being infected with bird flu in California in 2024
Many of the patients are dying within 48 hours of symptoms appearing and known viruses like Ebola and Marburg have been ruled out.
Mr Quammen is also concerned about mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which he called ‘neglected tropical diseases.’
Mr Quammen said: ‘[Dengue] has a huge impact in terms of sickness and mortality, but people don’t pay much attention to it because it’s carried by mosquitoes in tropical countries and we don’t have to worry about it up in the cool north.
‘At least we presently don’t. With climate change it may come to us.’
Other mosquito-borne diseases he named, but was less concerned about, were yellow fever, Zika and West Nile virus.
Aside from any current or possible viruses, Mr Quammen is also ‘absolutely’ worried about food safety and public health implications.
Not only are there 34billion chickens in the world at risk of being infected with bird flu, along with consumers eating their meat or eggs, but there is also a risk of farm workers handling infected birds, contracting the virus and then passing it to other humans.
He said the massive industrial agriculture and unsanitary conditions of meat farms and factories ‘are petri dishes for the evolution of viruses’.
Quammen added: ‘These mass industrial scale animal husbandry operations are dangerous for everybody, and not just the people who buy their poultry or their pork from those operations.
‘It’s not just the fact that we have 8billion humans on this planet. It’s the fact that we have 8billion humans and a large portion of those humans live in circumstances that allow them to buy a lot of animal protein.’
No matter where the next pandemic may come from, Mr Quammen said humans play a major role in either preventing or causing it.
Climate change, excess consumption, over population, over crowding and unsanitary living conditions all contribute to viral outbreaks.
Above is a map of locations where highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been detected in the US between May 2022 and February 2025
Mr Quammen said: ‘It’s not just sheer numbers of the human population that’s causing the problem. It’s population size multiplied by consumption.
‘And that’s causing two things. It’s causing disruption of wild ecosystems where a lot of these viruses live in wild animals minding their own business, and as we disrupt those ecosystems we give those viruses the opportunity to get into us to spill into humans.
‘And that’s an opportunity that is like winning the sweepstakes for the [viruses] because it gives them an extremely successful global virus.’
Additionally, Mr Quammen said the ‘factory scale’ production of animals for consumption is a major risk factor.’
‘We are also producing animal protein in domestic animals on a factory scale, with high concentrations of animals, hundreds of thousands of pigs, millions of chickens, crowded together on one farm or in one building,’ he explained.
To avoid a pandemic, Mr Quammen stressed stricter climate change protocols and focusing on a less meat-heavy diet could make a major difference.
‘Think twice about how much animal protein you buy and where you buy it,’ he said.
Mr Quammen also advised people ‘think twice about having children and think twice about how many children you have and how much you add to the human population on this planet.’
