The world will be hit by another pandemic 'in less than 100 years', Matt Hancock has said.
The Health Secretary made the claim while being questioned by the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee this morning.
Mr Hancock is being grilled by MPs investigating the Government's response to the global crisis.
It coms after he told the committee that "worst case scenario planning" for the Covid-19 coronavirus was based on Spanish flu, which caused the 1918 influenza pandemic.
In four successive waves, Spanish Flu infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time - and is estimated to caused as many as 100 million deaths.
“I asked for a reasonable worst case scenario planning assumption, and I was given the planning assumption based on Spanish flu, " said Mr Hancock.
“And it was signed off at Cobra on January 31, and that was a planning assumption for 820,000 deaths, and I was determined that that would not happen on my watch.”
Mr Hancock added: “And in the middle of February the scientific advice confirmed that the reasonable worst case scenario should be taken as read that this was equivalent to Spanish flu.
“I mean if you think about it, at the time at the end of January when that was first presented at Cobra, I, like everybody else, thought of Spanish flu as something you’ve read about in the history books, but as Health Secretary, you’re always worried about new pathogens.
“But knowing that that was the reasonable worst case scenario, we planned for it.”
Mr Hancock told MPs: “The week beginning the ninth of March, what happened is that the data started to follow the reasonable worst case scenario, and by the end of that week, the updated modelling, showed essentially that we were on the track of something close to that reasonable worst case scenario.”
Mr Hancock has also told MPs that scientists advising the Government were wrong about lockdowns and test and trace.
He said that the scientific advice stating that people would only tolerate lockdowns during the pandemic for a limited period was wrong - as was Sage's assessment that test and trace only had a marginal impact on transmission.
He also revealed that there are ongoing outbreaks of the monkeypox virus and a drug resistant form of Tuberculosis (TB) in the UK.
