Doctor and broadcaster Chris van Tulleken had a deeper and more traumatic encounter with Covid-19 than many. Not only did he tend to the sick at UCL hospital in London from the start of the pandemic, but his twin brother X suffered serious heart problems after catching the virus. Rather admirably, he mentions none of this during his new BBC Two documentary Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic.

But then this film is not one of those “all about me” documentaries (in any case, he covered his experiences with Covid in his more personal 2020 documentary , Surviving the Virus: My Brother and Me ). Instead, this is Tulleken’s global search for clues about the next pandemic and – in the opinion of all the experts here – a new one is coming. It’s just a question of when, where and in which

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