SCIENTISTS have been warning us for years that something like this was not just likely, but inevitable.

New diseases have emerged throughout history, but rocketing globalisation and so-called ‘glocalisation’ in recent years (the idea that ‘the world is becoming a smaller place’ as international travel gets easier) have meant that at some point a particularly contagious new disease was going to hop on a plane and travel through the entire global human population.

When it finally happened at the start of this year, it brought almost the entire planet to a standstill, and it also united humanity to an extent that humanity has never been united before: even arch sceptics such as President Trump wanted to find a vaccine as soon as possible so that everyone could get on with their lives.

So, the announcement yesterday that the Oxford vaccine team have proven the efficacy of their serum certainly feels like we have won.

And, indeed, it is the beginning of the end of this battle: with three vaccines now proven, governments across the world can now start dishing them out, starting with the most vulnerable first, so that we won’t have to live in various states of lockdown in order to keep people safe.

However, this event – Covid-19 – also marks a beginning: the fact that we have suffered, and lived through one pandemic, does not do much to prevent the next one breaking out.

What we have achieved is we have learnt an astronomical amount about how to respond when disaster strikes: we know how serious it can get and how quickly; we know many of the costs and benefits of putting a population into lockdown for various amounts of time, and we know a lot more about creating a vaccine to a new disease from scratch.

And, in this new world, scientists like ours in Oxford will be our front line of defence: their work over the past eight months has not just saved lives now, but will help save lives for generations to come.