Tweet
Just made it through this interesting article from The Economist that isn't pay walled. I'll summarize:
The central point is that the time is now to organize programs to identify the viral threats (there about 700K of them) and cone that down to the ones'that have the highest likelihood to make the leap from animals to people, spread quickly like SARS-CoV-2 and produce a pandemic. Several pilot projects since SARS and H5N1 (Avian Flu) did that and made progress but it takes billions to keep these projects going and no one is stepping up to pay for them.
The obstacles to a global program to do this are significant but if humans are to be ready for the next potentially pandemic causing virus after SARS-CoV-2- and there will be one - now is the time. Lots of smaller scale projects are already underway in countries around the world mostly in Asia where the bad ones seem to emerge. Even though there is professional interchange among virologist by various media mechanisms, there's no central organization to collect and collate data and make recommendations that might be applicable on a global scale.
Not a technical article but it is detailed to the extent that I had little knowledge of how extensive the study of viruses is - a lot of it is driven by the potential monetary value of gene sequencing the viruses, most of the RNA types, and investigating potential anti-viral therapies and vaccines. Lots of jealousies that lead to copyrighting research as intellectual property in the case of research institutes, and proprietary in the case of drug companies. Cooperation in getting to an endpoint of global preparedness to thwart the next virus is hard.
Alternatives, to date, much less palatable, as in the potential for millions or even billions of deaths and economic collapse, have been ignored.
Oh, and reading between the lines ..... fuck China ...... again and many times more. Those fuckers knew about SARS-CoV-2 that matured in bats, jumped to Civits and then to humans in China, months, maybe as long as a year ago, before going public and withheld information that may have helped in containing it to where it started.
https://www.economist.com/science-an...article-link-1
The central point is that the time is now to organize programs to identify the viral threats (there about 700K of them) and cone that down to the ones'that have the highest likelihood to make the leap from animals to people, spread quickly like SARS-CoV-2 and produce a pandemic. Several pilot projects since SARS and H5N1 (Avian Flu) did that and made progress but it takes billions to keep these projects going and no one is stepping up to pay for them.
The obstacles to a global program to do this are significant but if humans are to be ready for the next potentially pandemic causing virus after SARS-CoV-2- and there will be one - now is the time. Lots of smaller scale projects are already underway in countries around the world mostly in Asia where the bad ones seem to emerge. Even though there is professional interchange among virologist by various media mechanisms, there's no central organization to collect and collate data and make recommendations that might be applicable on a global scale.
Not a technical article but it is detailed to the extent that I had little knowledge of how extensive the study of viruses is - a lot of it is driven by the potential monetary value of gene sequencing the viruses, most of the RNA types, and investigating potential anti-viral therapies and vaccines. Lots of jealousies that lead to copyrighting research as intellectual property in the case of research institutes, and proprietary in the case of drug companies. Cooperation in getting to an endpoint of global preparedness to thwart the next virus is hard.
Alternatives, to date, much less palatable, as in the potential for millions or even billions of deaths and economic collapse, have been ignored.
Oh, and reading between the lines ..... fuck China ...... again and many times more. Those fuckers knew about SARS-CoV-2 that matured in bats, jumped to Civits and then to humans in China, months, maybe as long as a year ago, before going public and withheld information that may have helped in containing it to where it started.
https://www.economist.com/science-an...article-link-1
Comment