And your outcry strikes me as Dr.Evil from Austin Powers: "I demand... one million dollars!" The US spends around 650 billion USD on military toys, every year.

And your outcry strikes me as Dr.Evil from Austin Powers: "I demand... one million dollars!" The US spends around 650 billion USD on military toys, every year. Using 0.03% of that for pandemic research doesn't seem unreasonable. In fact I find that annoyingly low when you consider that we're talking about one of the few risk factors that could literally wipe us out as a species within a blink. You know the old joke where two planets meet? One asks: "Hey, how are you doing?" The other responds: "Ah not so good, I have homo sapiens." The first: "Ah no worries, you'll be better soon. They never last longer than a few thousand years."