I really hope that this is the lesson we get from the Covid-19 pandemic. To develop a series of easily manufacturable antivirals against all potentially pandemic causing viruses. It will cost a couple of billions but Covid-19 alone has cost us trillions already.
I hope that, as a result of this, those in power realize that we need to invest more in biotech. It seems to me that government pour too much money into things like deep learning research (which will serve to eliminate jobs and enable a surveillance state), and not enough in research that could save lives and eliminate illnesses.
We really should have the capability to develop and mass-manufacture antivirals much faster, ideally in the span of a few weeks. We understand the basic physics involved, we can do protein folding and I assume we can simulate how well synthetic molecules bind to proteins. Why don't we have this technological capability? It seems it really should be within the realm of what we're capable of achieving.
I am constantly surprised how often the answer to why aren't we funding this really ambitious but also really impactful project? is yup, DARPA is funding it, but nobody else is, and we probably should increase DARPA funding by 10x.
> At this moment, there is no pandemic influenza in the United States or the world. But if history is our guide, there is reason to be concerned. In the last century, our country and the world have been hit by three influenza pandemics -- and viruses from birds contributed to all of them. The first, which struck in 1918, killed over half-a-million Americans and more than 20 million people across the globe. One-third of the U.S. population was infected, and life expectancy in our country was reduced by 13 years. The 1918 pandemic was followed by pandemics in 1957 and 1968 which killed tens of thousands of Americans, and millions across the world.
> Three years ago, the world had a preview of the disruption an influenza pandemic can cause, when a previously unknown virus called SARS appeared in rural China.
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> The second part of our strategy is to protect the American people by stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs, and accelerating development of new vaccine technologies. One of the challenges presented by a pandemic is that scientists need a sample of the new strain before they can produce a vaccine against it. This means it is difficult to produce a pandemic vaccine before the pandemic actually appears -- and so there may not be a vaccine capable of fully immunizing our citizens from the new influenza virus during the first several months of a pandemic.
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> To protect the greatest possible number of Americans during a pandemic, the cornerstone of our strategy is to develop new technologies that will allow us to produce new vaccines rapidly. If a pandemic strikes our country -- if a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine online quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain.
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> Since American lives depend on rapid advances in vaccine production technology, we must fund a crash program to help our best scientists bring the next generation of technology online rapidly. I'm asking Congress for $2.8 billion to accelerate development of cell-culture technology. By bringing cell-culture technology from the research laboratory into the production line, we should be able to produce enough vaccine for every American within six months of the start of a pandemic.
I really don't get how people assume that the US (or anyone else for that matter) was just sitting on its hands this entire time not doing anything at all about fatal, potentially-epidemic viruses. As a matter of fact, we have been developing antivirals.
The new hotness in COVID antivirals is remdesivir, which was originally developed in 2015 or so to treat Ebola and Marburg viruses. Marburg and, to an even greater extent, Ebola viruses have caused deadly outbreaks and epidemics in recent years.
Tamiflu was also developed in the late 1990's as an antiviral targeted against influenza. We also have influenza vaccines that we update on an annual basis. Influenza is a massive area of research and public health work, largely inspired by the legacy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu pandemic as well as intermittent scares and smaller pandemics since then, including the H5N1 "bird" and H1N1 "swine" flu scares of the 00's--the latter of which did formally reach pandemic status.
HIV is one of the fundamentally scariest viruses out there, and enormous resources have been invested in it for decades to develop effective antiviral drugs and provide them at large scale. Starting in 2003, the US government deployed massive amounts of humanitarian aid under the PEPFAR program to curb the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, saving 18 million human lives.
Tens of billions of dollars were invested in these efforts. We got kicked in the nuts with a fucking coronavirus anyway. The fact of the matter is that Mother Nature is just a real bitch sometimes.
>Tens of billions of dollars were invested in these efforts. We got kicked in the nuts with a fucking coronavirus anyway. The fact of the matter is that Mother Nature is just a real bitch sometimes
Almost none of those billions were spent on sars-like coronaviruses though, despite the risk being well established after the last time mother nature was a bitch. Antivirals are only being developed if they can immediately turn a profit.
> Almost none of those billions were spent on sars-like coronaviruses though
That’s just not true. And at any rate, you’re only saying that with perfect hindsight, ignoring the other pandemic threats and actual, not potential epidemics that were addressed.
There’s an equally likely scenario as the one we find ourselves in now where research prioritizes coronaviruses and, as a result, there’s an Ebola or influenza pandemic instead. Or maybe we manage to avert first-world pandemics altogether at the expense of simply letting millions of people in the Global South die from HIV/AIDS.
> Antivirals are only being developed if they can immediately turn a profit.
Again this is ludicrous. Developing and producing antiviral drugs to treat Ebola and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa wasn’t done for profit. There’s no profit to be made there anyway, certainly not compared to wealthier markets like Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, or South Korea that faced coronavirus outbreaks in the past. Though, as it turns out, one of the more promising COVID antivirals, remdesivir, was originally intended to treat Ebola in the first place.
>That’s just not true. And at any rate, you’re only saying that with perfect hindsight, ignoring the other pandemic threats and actual, not potential epidemics that were addressed
This has been known as one of the major pandemic threats for quite some time now. Additional resources should have been spent preparing for it, but that doesn't require diverting resources from other threats.
>Or maybe we manage to avert first-world pandemics altogether at the expense of simply letting millions of people in the Global South die from HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS has killed around 800,000 people so far. If you're viewing this from a utilitarian view that is clearly the right choice. This pandemic already has the potential of killing more people in the Southern Hemisphere than HIV/AIDS has so far. And again, developing medicine for other diseases is still possible.
>Developing and producing antiviral drugs to treat Ebola and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa wasn’t done for profit.
Providing some relief for those in impoverished areas does not stop drug companies from making huge profits elsewhere. The US has already spent billions stockpiling for Ebola, and HIV spreads in wealthy countries as well.
