Where might it come from?
One source of Disease X could be the deliberate utilisation of infectious disease as a weapon.
While bio-weapons have been used since the middle ages (the Tartars catapulted the cadavers of plague victims into the besieged seaport of Caffa in 1346, for example), new scientific developments including gene editing and an exponential increase in computing power make it easier than ever to develop lethal biological agents.
The US and USSR explored bio-weapon development during the Cold War and both continue to hold live cultures of deadly pathogens, including the smallpox virus, in secretive and (hopefully) secure labs. More recently, the Iraqi military toyed with botulinum toxins under Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda operatives experimented with anthrax and, in 2014, a laptop captured from Islamic State (IS) was found to contain instructions on how to weaponise the plague virus.
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