8 ms·

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented

62 points by aberoham 6y ago

est31 6y ago
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.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  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.
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    This is exactly the goal of DARPA's Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program. https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform 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.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    Check out this 2005 statement from George W. Bush with some very similar ideas: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051101-1.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20... Some notable passages: > 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. ... > 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. ... > 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. ... > 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.
- philwelch 6y ago
  So that kind of reminds me of this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21 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.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    >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.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      > 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.
roenxi 6y ago
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. 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.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  Sorry, but the US has (had?) the world strongest economy and owns right to being the home of the dollar , the currency all others are measured against. It’s crazy to me to cry poor now, especially like the author said, trillions have been spent now, not billions on economic remedies which are likely to fail. This was just ignorance and a lack of foresight from administrations who had issues “trusting the science”. It’s going to be the same scenario in the US with regards to climate change, all the economic ability to tackle the issue head on early, existed, so little has been done. Also remember, the author is talking about the past, you can’t really blame China or India from 15 years ago not to have taken more appropriate action, they weren’t the economic powers they are today. Besides, why t try pass the blame?
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA. It is scary to me what will happen to those essential tools as the USA continues to deteriorate. Also, China was prepared for this epidemic. They experienced SARS. They knew there would be a SARS-2 sooner or later. They had lockdown plans ready to go for this. They had a huge research facility specialising in this threat where they thought it might occur.
    - 6y ago
aberoham 6y ago
This is by by Vincent Racaniello, a professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University. I highly recommend his podcast, This Week in Virology, aka TWiV. Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?
- est31 6y ago
  > Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes? Youtube STT is pretty good. You can open the autogenerated transcripts on youtube page, select all and copy them to a file. https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-you... Second the recommendation. I've been watching his virology lectures. Teaches you a lot about viruses, although it sometimes contains organic chemistry that I don't know about, but outside of that it's great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEzNoWL0Cso1jip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...
- innocenat 6y ago
  I wish this was included in the post. Among the first things I do when I read these articles were to search for author credentials, and I couldn't find one in that article.
wallflower 6y ago
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.
- kitotik 6y ago
  Are you implying that the 1918 pandemic resulted in some sort of lesson learned or a fundamental shift in culture?
  - stormbrew 6y ago
    If anything, it actually seems to have resulted in a decade of partying.
  - wallflower 6y ago
    We are all living through this in real-time. A few of us even know people who have died from COVID-19 [1]. For the first time in a long time, on a large scale, many people are experiencing the effects of normalcy bias, even if they don't it is called that particular term. [2] Good or bad, we are all seeing the results of having a global supply chain. For the first time in a long time, most of us know people who are unemployed for reasons that are beyond their control. We are seeing acutely the benefits of a social safety net. [3] For the first time in a very long time, with few exceptions, people are not experiencing FOMO as it relates to the innocent but probing "what are you doing this weekend?" or "what did you do this weekend?", as people simply cannot "go out on a Friday" like they did just a couple months ago. The whole casual Tinder hookup culture is undergoing a sea change in the temporary era of social distancing, as kissing is a known probable vector for virus transmission. Let alone, having a date in a restaurant is a vaguer memory every passing day. The Internet, broadly speaking, is fueling a return to creativity not seen widely since the days of MySpace. Creativity almost always thrives under constraint. For example, Russian isolation art [4]. Finally, for those who are saying we'll forget about this in two years... (normalcy bias) what if there is ultimately no successful vaccine and just a set of treatments that are fairly to moderately successful once you are infected? [1] > The CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook provides readers with a look at the impact pandemic flu events have had on both survivors and the families and friends of non-survivors. These stories are not folklore, but personal recollections. https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.html https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.htm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavirus-labor-help.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavir... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Facebook-art-parodies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Faceb...
empath75 6y ago
> 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. It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.
- c3534l 6y ago
  Unfortunately to say, the President of the United States is not a reliable source. US intelligence agencies said Trump is wrong, and without any further evidence, it should be placed in the conspiracy theory category.
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    What's the conspiracy here? We know that WIV studies coronavirus. It could have been inadvertently leaked. He also said it's "possible". Notice the lack of certainty. From what i know, the wet market theory also lacks evidence. All we know is that this evolved naturally and was not designed in a lab. It could still evolve in a lab, or evolve elsewhere and studied in the lab.
    - c3534l 6y ago
      Maybe I responded too strongly, based on other things I've read on other sites. "Currently unfounded" might have been a better way to phrase it.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    I don't think Wuhan labs started the virus, but I'd point out that the job of spy agencies is to lie and manipulate the public. Trump's a liar but so are the spooks. Trump is transparently attempting to pin the blame on a foreign power so that way he isn't blamed for the epidemic in the US. Essentially, who is blamed will determine the 2020 election. One read no further than that to understand his motivations.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
KCUOJJQJ 6y ago
>A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic. 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.
wintorez 6y ago
I fear that this pandemic eventually passes and we learn nothing from it.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  In fairness, over the long run, we don't really "learn" anything from any major world events. Human nature is human nature, and we'll always prioritize the immediate threats over something vague and in the future. It's why climate change is virtually inevitable.
- typon 6y ago
  The most likely outcome, i'm afraid
alex_young 6y ago
There'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. Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this. It requires a switch to a plant based diet. It's really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would personally benefit them and everyone around them. EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I'm happy to hear your alternate opinion.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  It’s been horrifying to read about the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of pigs by allowing them to cook alive in their pens, simply because of a “drop in demand.” If people want to understand the nihilistic impulses behind some of those pushing to “reopen the economy,” they’d do well to observe how livestock are being treated in this moment of crisis. The belief in their entitlement to impose misery and death on life that’s “beneath them” isn’t limited to animals.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  > switch to a plant based diet It amazes how incendiary this is. People even on HN will frequently respond to such a thing by boasting with adolescent glee how much meat they eat. It's easy to feel like we live in an advanced era with our internet and gadgets, but I often think about how far we still have to go as a species. To our credit, it was only yesteryear that our tools were stone and fur and tribes. Not easy to evolve past that.
- fullmoon 6y ago
  You imply that people dismiss vegan diets out of habits and not because of the shoddy science, bad health outcomes, and all of the lies coming from this cult.
  - flashman 6y ago
    Cult! Ha!
- 6y ago
paypalcust83 6y ago
{C,Sh,W}oulda
typon 6y ago
No it couldn'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. Preventing another pandemic means rethinking how the incentives in this current system are structured.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  I agree that it's a matter of changing the incentives. It seems possible though. Governments are pulling trillions of dollars out of thin air for relief measures. They have the ability to print money and have been expanding the money supply since there has been money. It's a matter of allocating said money to the right things. Maybe instead of keeping zombie companies alive through zero-interest debt, we should be letting badly managed companies die, and fund critical research instead, as well as infrastructure projects. That would create jobs and help us build a better future.
SiebenHeaven 6y ago
There'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.
seventytwo 6y ago
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.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  > this is a natural disaster True, but it’s been frustratingly exacerbated and perpetuated by corrupt private interests and fundamentally unqualified leadership. I agree that our focus should be on mitigation and response, but the genesis of this debacle is fair game, particularly in an election year. The Official US death toll just surpassed the Vietnam War count, and that figure is widely speculated to be underreported. Not to mention that health experts are warning of a second wave in the winter, when Americans travel the most. People have every right to know exactly how the US got its butt kicked by the worst public health crisis in a century.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    Even to the degree that's the case, "failing to accurately guess the taxonomic category of the next virus to cause a pandemic" is a really dumb criticism. Based on the evidence prior to 2019--hell, even prior to about February of this year--coronaviruses didn't really seem like that much more of a potential threat than influenza or maybe Ebola. If you want to criticize the US government, criticize them for depleting the Strategic National Stockpile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile), maintaining pointless and counterproductive regulatory barriers against meaningful testing until it was too late, not listening to early warning signs from China and Taiwan, not effectively coordinating between local, state, and federal agencies, allowing the CDC to lose focus by wasting resources on merely metaphorical "epidemics" like obesity and gun violence, or having a political culture more focused on partisan bickering and gainsaying than on competent governance. But please, don't criticize them for not being clairvoyant enough to proactively cure coronaviruses.
  - ezoe 6y ago
    >Vietnam War count What count? The number of American death? It's the least of concerns if think about the total civilian death.
forgot_my_pwd 6y ago
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. Assigning blame to any one country for a pandemic which is affecting literally the entire world is petty and disingenuous. All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.
- Jedd 6y ago
  I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources. TFA wasn't assigning blame for the pandemic per se, from my reading, but was pointing out the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma. > All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this. For most of the 190+ countries on the planet, that would be true for very small values of 'more'.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    > I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources. Sure. > the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma. I don't think it's just profit motive that caused those lines of research to be dropped. SARS was effectively eradicated and MERS was mostly contained. Sure there was a pandemic risk, but there were also pandemic risks with influenza and ebola, both of which saw lots of research and active countermeasures. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS was spreading to the tune of over a million cases per year. If you're a rational, altruistic person trying to make a decision about where to focus investment in antiviral research at this point in time, you had a lot of reasons to invest in HIV, a lot of reasons to invest in influenza, and maybe only a few long-shot reasons to invest in Ebola or coronaviruses. At its peak HIV was an immediate death sentence that over a million people on Earth got every year. I think it would have been a hard sell at the time to try and divert funds away from addressing that problem just in case there was a sequel to SARS that couldn't be stopped the same way SARS was.
dathinab 6y ago
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. In practice even a union of all first world countries can't afford it as far as I know. There is also the problem about constant mutations. E.g. after the SARS-Cov outbreak medicine against it was development. But it couldn't be used efficiently against SARS-Cov-2 . Through it likely did reduce the amount of time so need until we get a vaccine. So putting money into developing vaccines for all kind of latent viruses makes sense for gaining knowledge. But it's not cable is preventing pandemies.
pmorici 6y ago
This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money.
- Jedd 6y ago
  > This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money. Compare the cost of this kind of pandemic, which was generally agreed as likely to happen at some point. Or consider it in a per capita context -- about US$100 per citizen of the USA. Given this, and given what the USA spends most of its money on, I agree with TFA - the NIH is woefully underfunded.
philwelch 6y ago
Alright so the most absurd leap in reasoning is probably here: > 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.... > 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. Why single out the US government in particular with the responsibility to come up with a "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" that should have been on hand to treat an outbreak in Wuhan? I'm not saying the NIH shouldn'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't any of those countries equally to blame? There's the further speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was originally released due to some lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that'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 actually trying to do that only to be undone by some procedural blunder. There's also a huge degree of hindsight here. Pandemics tend to occur from time to time, and we'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 "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" only to fall victim to an influenza or Ebola pandemic, I'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. Speaking of which, there's an elephant in the room. Maybe the US government didn't sufficiently invest in speculative countermeasures against a potential epidemic. But, starting in 2003, they did invest in countermeasures against the actual epidemic of HIV/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. I'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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dogma1138 6y ago
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.

62 points by aberoham 6y ago

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.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
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.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  This is exactly the goal of DARPA's Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program. https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform 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.
- philwelch 6y ago
  Check out this 2005 statement from George W. Bush with some very similar ideas: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051101-1.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20... Some notable passages: > 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. ... > 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. ... > 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. ... > 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.
philwelch 6y ago
So that kind of reminds me of this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21 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.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >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.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    > 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.

roenxi 6y ago

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. 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.

bamboozled 6y ago
Sorry, but the US has (had?) the world strongest economy and owns right to being the home of the dollar , the currency all others are measured against. It’s crazy to me to cry poor now, especially like the author said, trillions have been spent now, not billions on economic remedies which are likely to fail. This was just ignorance and a lack of foresight from administrations who had issues “trusting the science”. It’s going to be the same scenario in the US with regards to climate change, all the economic ability to tackle the issue head on early, existed, so little has been done. Also remember, the author is talking about the past, you can’t really blame China or India from 15 years ago not to have taken more appropriate action, they weren’t the economic powers they are today. Besides, why t try pass the blame?
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA. It is scary to me what will happen to those essential tools as the USA continues to deteriorate. Also, China was prepared for this epidemic. They experienced SARS. They knew there would be a SARS-2 sooner or later. They had lockdown plans ready to go for this. They had a huge research facility specialising in this threat where they thought it might occur.
  - 6y ago

aberoham 6y ago

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

est31 6y ago
> Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes? Youtube STT is pretty good. You can open the autogenerated transcripts on youtube page, select all and copy them to a file. https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-you... Second the recommendation. I've been watching his virology lectures. Teaches you a lot about viruses, although it sometimes contains organic chemistry that I don't know about, but outside of that it's great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEzNoWL0Cso1jip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...
innocenat 6y ago
I wish this was included in the post. Among the first things I do when I read these articles were to search for author credentials, and I couldn't find one in that article.

wallflower 6y ago

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.

kitotik 6y ago
Are you implying that the 1918 pandemic resulted in some sort of lesson learned or a fundamental shift in culture?
- stormbrew 6y ago
  If anything, it actually seems to have resulted in a decade of partying.
- wallflower 6y ago
  We are all living through this in real-time. A few of us even know people who have died from COVID-19 [1]. For the first time in a long time, on a large scale, many people are experiencing the effects of normalcy bias, even if they don't it is called that particular term. [2] Good or bad, we are all seeing the results of having a global supply chain. For the first time in a long time, most of us know people who are unemployed for reasons that are beyond their control. We are seeing acutely the benefits of a social safety net. [3] For the first time in a very long time, with few exceptions, people are not experiencing FOMO as it relates to the innocent but probing "what are you doing this weekend?" or "what did you do this weekend?", as people simply cannot "go out on a Friday" like they did just a couple months ago. The whole casual Tinder hookup culture is undergoing a sea change in the temporary era of social distancing, as kissing is a known probable vector for virus transmission. Let alone, having a date in a restaurant is a vaguer memory every passing day. The Internet, broadly speaking, is fueling a return to creativity not seen widely since the days of MySpace. Creativity almost always thrives under constraint. For example, Russian isolation art [4]. Finally, for those who are saying we'll forget about this in two years... (normalcy bias) what if there is ultimately no successful vaccine and just a set of treatments that are fairly to moderately successful once you are infected? [1] > The CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook provides readers with a look at the impact pandemic flu events have had on both survivors and the families and friends of non-survivors. These stories are not folklore, but personal recollections. https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.html https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.htm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavirus-labor-help.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavir... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Facebook-art-parodies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Faceb...

empath75 6y ago

> 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. It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.

c3534l 6y ago
Unfortunately to say, the President of the United States is not a reliable source. US intelligence agencies said Trump is wrong, and without any further evidence, it should be placed in the conspiracy theory category.
- legolas2412 6y ago
  What's the conspiracy here? We know that WIV studies coronavirus. It could have been inadvertently leaked. He also said it's "possible". Notice the lack of certainty. From what i know, the wet market theory also lacks evidence. All we know is that this evolved naturally and was not designed in a lab. It could still evolve in a lab, or evolve elsewhere and studied in the lab.
  - c3534l 6y ago
    Maybe I responded too strongly, based on other things I've read on other sites. "Currently unfounded" might have been a better way to phrase it.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  I don't think Wuhan labs started the virus, but I'd point out that the job of spy agencies is to lie and manipulate the public. Trump's a liar but so are the spooks. Trump is transparently attempting to pin the blame on a foreign power so that way he isn't blamed for the epidemic in the US. Essentially, who is blamed will determine the 2020 election. One read no further than that to understand his motivations.
  - whatshisface 6y ago

KCUOJJQJ 6y ago

>A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic. 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.

wintorez 6y ago

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

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
In fairness, over the long run, we don't really "learn" anything from any major world events. Human nature is human nature, and we'll always prioritize the immediate threats over something vague and in the future. It's why climate change is virtually inevitable.
typon 6y ago
The most likely outcome, i'm afraid

alex_young 6y ago

There'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. Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this. It requires a switch to a plant based diet. It's really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would personally benefit them and everyone around them. EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I'm happy to hear your alternate opinion.

claudeganon 6y ago
It’s been horrifying to read about the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of pigs by allowing them to cook alive in their pens, simply because of a “drop in demand.” If people want to understand the nihilistic impulses behind some of those pushing to “reopen the economy,” they’d do well to observe how livestock are being treated in this moment of crisis. The belief in their entitlement to impose misery and death on life that’s “beneath them” isn’t limited to animals.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
> switch to a plant based diet It amazes how incendiary this is. People even on HN will frequently respond to such a thing by boasting with adolescent glee how much meat they eat. It's easy to feel like we live in an advanced era with our internet and gadgets, but I often think about how far we still have to go as a species. To our credit, it was only yesteryear that our tools were stone and fur and tribes. Not easy to evolve past that.
fullmoon 6y ago
You imply that people dismiss vegan diets out of habits and not because of the shoddy science, bad health outcomes, and all of the lies coming from this cult.
- flashman 6y ago
  Cult! Ha!
6y ago

paypalcust83 6y ago

{C,Sh,W}oulda

typon 6y ago

No it couldn'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. Preventing another pandemic means rethinking how the incentives in this current system are structured.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
I agree that it's a matter of changing the incentives. It seems possible though. Governments are pulling trillions of dollars out of thin air for relief measures. They have the ability to print money and have been expanding the money supply since there has been money. It's a matter of allocating said money to the right things. Maybe instead of keeping zombie companies alive through zero-interest debt, we should be letting badly managed companies die, and fund critical research instead, as well as infrastructure projects. That would create jobs and help us build a better future.

SiebenHeaven 6y ago

There'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.

seventytwo 6y ago

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.

save_ferris 6y ago
> this is a natural disaster True, but it’s been frustratingly exacerbated and perpetuated by corrupt private interests and fundamentally unqualified leadership. I agree that our focus should be on mitigation and response, but the genesis of this debacle is fair game, particularly in an election year. The Official US death toll just surpassed the Vietnam War count, and that figure is widely speculated to be underreported. Not to mention that health experts are warning of a second wave in the winter, when Americans travel the most. People have every right to know exactly how the US got its butt kicked by the worst public health crisis in a century.
- philwelch 6y ago
  Even to the degree that's the case, "failing to accurately guess the taxonomic category of the next virus to cause a pandemic" is a really dumb criticism. Based on the evidence prior to 2019--hell, even prior to about February of this year--coronaviruses didn't really seem like that much more of a potential threat than influenza or maybe Ebola. If you want to criticize the US government, criticize them for depleting the Strategic National Stockpile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile), maintaining pointless and counterproductive regulatory barriers against meaningful testing until it was too late, not listening to early warning signs from China and Taiwan, not effectively coordinating between local, state, and federal agencies, allowing the CDC to lose focus by wasting resources on merely metaphorical "epidemics" like obesity and gun violence, or having a political culture more focused on partisan bickering and gainsaying than on competent governance. But please, don't criticize them for not being clairvoyant enough to proactively cure coronaviruses.
- ezoe 6y ago
  >Vietnam War count What count? The number of American death? It's the least of concerns if think about the total civilian death.

forgot_my_pwd 6y ago

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. Assigning blame to any one country for a pandemic which is affecting literally the entire world is petty and disingenuous. All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

Jedd 6y ago
I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources. TFA wasn't assigning blame for the pandemic per se, from my reading, but was pointing out the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma. > All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this. For most of the 190+ countries on the planet, that would be true for very small values of 'more'.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources. Sure. > the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma. I don't think it's just profit motive that caused those lines of research to be dropped. SARS was effectively eradicated and MERS was mostly contained. Sure there was a pandemic risk, but there were also pandemic risks with influenza and ebola, both of which saw lots of research and active countermeasures. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS was spreading to the tune of over a million cases per year. If you're a rational, altruistic person trying to make a decision about where to focus investment in antiviral research at this point in time, you had a lot of reasons to invest in HIV, a lot of reasons to invest in influenza, and maybe only a few long-shot reasons to invest in Ebola or coronaviruses. At its peak HIV was an immediate death sentence that over a million people on Earth got every year. I think it would have been a hard sell at the time to try and divert funds away from addressing that problem just in case there was a sequel to SARS that couldn't be stopped the same way SARS was.

dathinab 6y ago

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. In practice even a union of all first world countries can't afford it as far as I know. There is also the problem about constant mutations. E.g. after the SARS-Cov outbreak medicine against it was development. But it couldn't be used efficiently against SARS-Cov-2 . Through it likely did reduce the amount of time so need until we get a vaccine. So putting money into developing vaccines for all kind of latent viruses makes sense for gaining knowledge. But it's not cable is preventing pandemies.

pmorici 6y ago

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

Jedd 6y ago
> This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money. Compare the cost of this kind of pandemic, which was generally agreed as likely to happen at some point. Or consider it in a per capita context -- about US$100 per citizen of the USA. Given this, and given what the USA spends most of its money on, I agree with TFA - the NIH is woefully underfunded.

philwelch 6y ago

Alright so the most absurd leap in reasoning is probably here: > 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.... > 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. Why single out the US government in particular with the responsibility to come up with a "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" that should have been on hand to treat an outbreak in Wuhan? I'm not saying the NIH shouldn'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't any of those countries equally to blame? There's the further speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was originally released due to some lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that'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 actually trying to do that only to be undone by some procedural blunder. There's also a huge degree of hindsight here. Pandemics tend to occur from time to time, and we'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 "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" only to fall victim to an influenza or Ebola pandemic, I'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. Speaking of which, there's an elephant in the room. Maybe the US government didn't sufficiently invest in speculative countermeasures against a potential epidemic. But, starting in 2003, they did invest in countermeasures against the actual epidemic of HIV/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. I'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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dogma1138 6y ago

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.