The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented

I’m not sure why this was flagged Vincent Racaniello is a pretty well known immunologist he is the one behind the discovery of PVR (the discovery of the polio receptor allowed his team to develop a technique for animal models for viruses that only infect humans such as polio which is still used today to study diseases that do not have other natural hosts) and the mechanisms for interferon immunity in viruses.

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.

Even if it could have been prevented, there is significant probability that another novel virus could arise from bat or other reservoirs in the future. Similar to how H1N1 better prepared certain countries who experienced it, this could be the wake-up call that was needed to help future generations survive a much worse virus by getting them more used to a life where being in a crowd is not normal. There are very few people alive who lived through the previous 1918 pandemic. This is our 1918 or, at least, a strong warning.

This is by by Vincent Racaniello, a professor of Microbiology &amp; Immunology at Columbia University.<p>I highly recommend his podcast, This Week in Virology, aka TWiV.<p>Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?

This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is &quot;under-funded&quot;. I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I&#x27;m not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn&#x27;t seem like they are some small agency starved for money.

Guys, this is a natural disaster. The blame game about causality is fucking stupid. Mitigation and response is all that matters because it’s all that’s actually under our (humanity’s) control.

There&#x27;s thousand such threats to humanity that need to be prevented even right now. The real problem is determining which threat is real and prioritising. Think of it like you are a celebrity. You recieve thousands of threats daily, most of these are just threats which will never realise. The problem is identifying which ones will and acting on those to prevent them.

I suppose if you already have a grudge against the US you can pick and choose which facts you focus on to try to piece together a narrative that blames the US for this... But of course that narrative is extremely flimsy.<p>Assigning blame to any one country for a pandemic which is affecting literally the entire world is petty and disingenuous.<p>All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

I fear that this pandemic eventually passes and we learn nothing from it.

No it couldn&#x27;t have been prevented under the current system of global capitalism. No market forces means no research done by private companies. This kind of forward thinking project requires billions of dollars of funding by the government into large-scale public programs - something the US public has been allergic to since the 80s.<p>Preventing another pandemic means rethinking how the incentives in this current system are structured.

There&#x27;s an easier way to prevent animal nexus illnesses. This includes SARS, COVID, MERS, Ebola, E Coli, and many others. This change would have a byproduct of massively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the life expectancy of billions of people.<p>Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this.<p>It requires a switch to a plant based diet.<p>It&#x27;s really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would personally benefit them and everyone around them.<p>EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I&#x27;m happy to hear your alternate opinion.

&gt;A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic.<p>Would it make sense to test this drug on 80 year old people who are also ill? Usually young healthy people get the drugs in these trials AFAIK.

Developing protection medicine against all potential bad pandemic viri in animals, it even just the ones we know of which at just a small party is only possible in theory.<p>In practice even a union of all first world countries can&#x27;t afford it as far as I know.<p>There is also the problem about constant mutations.<p>E.g. after the SARS-Cov outbreak medicine against it was development. But it couldn&#x27;t be used efficiently against SARS-Cov-2 . Through it likely did reduce the amount of time so need until we get a vaccine.<p>So putting money into developing vaccines for all kind of latent viruses makes sense for gaining knowledge. <i>But it&#x27;s not cable is preventing pandemies.</i>

Alright so the most absurd leap in reasoning is probably here:<p>&gt; In one scenario, we have stockpiles of a pan-CoV antiviral drug, enough to treat millions of people. When SARS-CoV-2 is first identified in Wuhan, the drug is immediately given a large phase II efficacy trial....<p>&gt; It’s easy to blame bats for unwittingly giving humanity SARS-CoV-2. But I also blame both big Pharma and the US government for failing to come up with a pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine.<p>Why single out the <i>US</i> government in particular with the responsibility to come up with a &quot;pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine&quot; that should have been on hand to treat an outbreak in <i>Wuhan</i>? I&#x27;m not saying the NIH shouldn&#x27;t have worked on it, but there were other countries with the ability and incentive to do so. There was nothing stopping China, Taiwan, or Canada from doing something after SARS, or South Korea from doing something after MERS, so why aren&#x27;t any of those countries equally to blame?<p>There&#x27;s the further speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was originally released due to some lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that&#x27;s true, it only further undermines this Monday morning quarterbacking, because it would mean that one of the countries with the most vested interest in preventing this pandemic, and one of the best equipped to do something about it, was <i>actually trying to do that</i> only to be undone by some procedural blunder.<p>There&#x27;s also a huge degree of hindsight here. Pandemics tend to occur from time to time, and we&#x27;re barely on the verge of having the tech level necessary to prevent them. Up to and including 2019, we had a couple of near-misses with coronaviruses, but we also had near-misses with influenza and Ebola among others. If the US or anyone else somehow managed to come up with some &quot;pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine&quot; only to fall victim to an influenza or Ebola pandemic, I&#x27;m sure some wise guy would be going around telling us how stupid they were for not being better prepared. In reality, the world has collectively gone to heroic measures to try and snuff out these outbreaks when and where they initially occur before they turn into pandemics.<p>Speaking of which, there&#x27;s an elephant in the room. Maybe the US government didn&#x27;t sufficiently invest in speculative countermeasures against a potential epidemic. But, starting in 2003, they <i>did</i> invest in countermeasures against the <i>actual</i> epidemic of HIV&#x2F;AIDS, and managed to save over 17 million lives. In fact, Drs. Fauci and Birx have both been personally involved with that program for many years.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the US did everything right, but in some sense the world got a really bad break with COVID-19 if you look at where virology efforts were focused. And our shortcomings in terms of public health policy would have been the same for any pandemic.

His facts might be right but his tone is unreasonable. This epidemic started in China, neighbor to India. Those two countries are home to something like 20-25% of the worlds human resources and are basically on the doorstep of being advanced world-striding superpowers. China in particular is becoming a technological colossus and India is already a major player when it comes to actually producing these drugs.<p>Assigning the blame on the NIH or US funding would be fine in the 1980s; but this is really an issue for the Asians to take leadership on. China was in a much better position to study all these viruses. The US failed on disease screening for incoming travelers.

{C,Sh,W}oulda

&gt; The viral outbreak could have been stopped in December in Wuhan had we had the foresight and financial support to develop antiviral drugs or vaccines.<p>It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.