The Guinean village of Meliandou lies in a poverty-wracked triangle of forest in West Africa on the border with Liberia and Sierra Leone. It was there, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), that on Boxing Day 2013 a two-year-old boy fell seriously ill. A couple of days later, he died.

No one knew it then, but that boy was the first case in a three-year ebola epidemic that is known to have infected almost 30,000 people and killed more than 11,000, though the true rates are likely to be much higher.

Some 18 months after death came to Meliandou, it triggered action 4,000 miles away, in Downing Street. In June 2015, David Cameron, then prime minister, established the UK Vaccine Network (UKVN) “to ensure that the UK was at the forefront of the global fight against future disease outbreaks”.

But Cameron wasn’t just worried about outbreaks abroad. He was worried about their impact on an unready Britain.

UKVN set up a working group of experts, some of whom today have become household names. Chris Whitty, then of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, now the Chief Medical Officer, was one. Prof Sarah Gilbert, now leading Britain’s most advanced effort to develop a Covid-19 vaccine at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, was another. The group drew up a priority list of 13 diseases that caused them most concern. It included plague, ebola, dengue, rift valley fever, as well as the coronavirus behind Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).

Last September the panel released a report, revealing progress in two crucial areas – R&D and manufacturing vaccines against epidemic diseases. On the former, they were upbeat. The post-ebola panic had led “to the prioritisation of spending in emerging diseases vaccine research and development from the UK”.