The Australian professor who cracked the genetic code of the virus that causes COVID-19 said the world should have been working on a coronavirus vaccine for years but governments had become "complacent" about bat coronaviruses after SARS was defeated.

Edward Holmes, a researcher based at the University of Sydney who is considered among the world's leading experts on the virus's genetics, evolution and origin, said a pandemic had been inevitable but governments refused to take the threat seriously.

Professor Edward Holmes, of the University of Sydney, who cracked the genetic code of the virus that causes COVID-19, says the world should have been working on a coronavirus vaccine for years.

"It is no surprise another coronavirus emerged in humans. We have been monitoring these viruses. They've been jumping species boundaries," Professor Holmes said. "We knew this was going to happen.

"Bats have been carrying these viruses for millennia. It's not them that's changed, it's us – the way we interact with them."