McGill creates lab to prepare for future pandemics

McGill University is officially launching a new intervention lab on Tuesday to better prepare for the next pandemic and other emergencies, such as climate disasters and wars.

The Pandemic and Emergency Readiness Lab (PERL) currently has seven scientists, but the goal is for the project to grow and for other experts from across the province to join the lab’s mission to improve crisis response by advancing research and promoting the importance of preparedness to decision-makers.

PERL was created on the premise that the next crisis won’t wait for us to be ready and that we must identify best practices, said Dr. Joanne Liu, director of PERL, speaking to an audience at the launch at McGill University.

Several experts agree that the COVID-19 pandemic was nothing compared to the devastating effects that a future pandemic could have.

“Of course, we don’t want to be alarmist because there is so much trauma in the population, but the reality is that it’s true that [for COVID-19], the lethality was not that high. Lethality means deaths. It was contagious, but not super contagious like measles, for example. So we weren’t in the worst-case scenario,” Dr. Liu said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The laboratory will focus particularly on preparedness for health crises, but not exclusively. The climate crisis and wars could benefit just as much from the preparations that scientists are putting in place.

“It’s really for all crises. What we see is that these crises, which often overlap, really create a ripple and multiplier effect on the impact on health systems and society,” explained Dr. Liu. “In terms of the environmental crisis, it fuels pandemics, because we know that the pressure we put on the environment causes species jumps. That’s how Ebola arrived in 2014.”

A species jump is when an animal virus is transmitted to a human and causes the emergence of a human disease.

Researchers at the new laboratory have already begun their work, particularly in the areas of risk anticipation and data and system innovation.

“There is really a pillar of work that will focus on disinformation and misinformation,” said Dr. Liu. “We know that today, probably one of the biggest threats to keeping a population together is this current of disinformation and misinformation. So we’re going to work on that.

“We have a project on measles,” she added, “because right now, we’re seeing that people are saying that measles vaccines cause autism, and we’ve also had a dip in vaccination rates post-COVID.”

Dr. Liu, who is also a professor in the Department of Global and Public Health at McGill University, points out that more than 94 per cent of people need to be vaccinated for the population to be protected against measles.

“We’re far from that, we’re nowhere near it,” she says.

—

The Canadian Press’s health coverage is supported by a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. The Canadian Press is solely responsible for this journalistic content.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Feb. 3, 2026.