The pandemic is over, peaking in December with the arrival of the Omicron variant, and we were lucky it was a coronavirus and not another ’flu.

his pandemic has petered out relatively quickly because most of the developed world managed to quickly and effectively vaccinate the vulnerable.

With the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, many people who did not want to be vaccinated got vaccinated naturally, by exposure to the relatively harmless new variant.

Ireland and the UK should be proud of how they were among the first in the world to step forward in recent months and decide to remove the bulk of all pandemic restrictions.

In the weeks and months ahead, I am certain we will see other countries in the world doing the same.

We have successfully come through Covid more quickly than many other countries because we opened up our societies during the summers of 2020 and 2021.

Yes, there were subsequent lockdowns, but by opening up during those two summers, we allowed many to get infected and build up natural immunity to Covid, at a time of year when the chance of getting seriously ill from other respiratory diseases was substantially lessened.

The world media will frighten the life out of us from time to time by discussing the possible emergence of a nasty new variant. However, I am absolutely certain that there will be no nasty new variants or mutations because this pandemic was a coronavirus. Coronaviruses tend to be more predictable, generally more contiguous and less pathogenic as they evolve.

One of the reasons for this is that they are among a small group of known viruses that have an inbuilt ‘proofreading’ capability, which means the viruses effectively ‘double check’ that new variants are similar to the previous ones.

This is different to the way influenza, Zika virus, Ebola, yellow fever or Lassa fever self-replicate.

It is almost impossible to predict what new variants of these illnesses will look like and how pathogenic or how contagious they may be.

Many people are still dying from Covid-19, particularly in Hong Kong. But Hong Kong has one of the world’s lowest vaccination rates, with only 39pc of people over 80 fully vaccinated and 49pc of the over-60s.

Meanwhile, 96pc of deaths occurred in people over 60 between January and March this year, a report published by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention found.

The vast majority of people under 60 with no underlying health conditions have very little to fear from Covid-19.

Globally, people who got very sick and died from Covid were generally over 70, had underlying health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory problems or cancer, or were obese. North America has the highest rate of obesity in the world.

According to the UN, the median age of the European population – the mid-point between the youngest and oldest citizens – was 43 in 2019. That compares to 39 in North America and 20 in Africa.

WHO data shows that Africa has the lowest number of Covid deaths in the world, despite just 16pc of Africans being fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control.

In my opinion, the countries that will struggle with Covid over the next 12 months will be countries such as Australia and New Zealand, which have remained closed to the outside world and never got a chance to build up any natural immunity, and China, which has also enacted strict lockdowns and did not have access to highly successful western vaccines.

Scientists have been working on mRNA technology for decades and it has been regarded in the scientific community as a potential ‘holy grail’ for a vast array of disease prevention.

Thanks to the accelerated pace of innovation during the pandemic, this mRNA technology has been proven successful and has been accepted by regulators in the US and Europe.

New mRNA vaccines can now be rolled out in mass production in less than 100 days and are a weapon not just against Covid-19 but against future pandemics.

They also hold promise for some cancers.

Poolbeg Pharma specialises in a range of pipeline drugs for infectious diseases to avoid future pandemics.

These drugs range from POLB-001, a drug for treating severe influenza, to POLB-002, a nasal spray which has pan-­viral blocking capability.

The prime reason this pandemic caused so much damage is because, for the past 30 years, governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world spent virtually nothing on developing new infectious disease products.

There has been more money spent on infectious disease product development in the last two years than there was in the last 50. We have been very lucky this pandemic was a coronavirus pandemic because it was predictable.

I am convinced that with all the efforts going on in biotechs around the world, governments will be so well prepared that no matter what nature throws at us, we will have a drug to treat the next pandemic as soon as it arrives.

Cathal Friel is co-founder and chairman of Poolbeg Pharma Plc