[Jedd]

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]

> 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.

[Jedd]

You're right - it wasn't entirely profit motive, but that was a non-trivial component of many of the decisions. Trying to generalise the actions of the medical & pharmaceutical research and industry components as a whole is necessarily fraught.

There's news, though how much I trust I am not sure, coming out of the USA since COVID19 started, that various pandemic response teams, earlier research, etc - had been abandoned only very recently.

Ebola etc - well, we're going off at a tangent, but practically that kind of very fast acting, very high mortality rate pathogen is relatively easy to stop, if for no other reason than most people are going to be sufficiently petrified of their organs dissolving, brutal pain, and almost certain death. It's been noted before that ebola is too effective to cause a pandemic.

HIV - treatments are available now, and you're right, it was (up until 2019) a bigger risk than COVID, but I'm sure there's some political and social resistance to funding a disease that still has various stigmas associated with it. I guess part of that social mindset is a feeling by most people that they can't possibly get HIV.

But, yes, rational and altruistic - I know we're not either of those things by and large. But if you asked your average USA citizen now if they wish NIH had been funded at something > $100 per person, I reckon you'd get a resounding affirmative.

[philwelch]

> It's been noted before that ebola is too effective to cause a pandemic.

Something we can all be thankful for. It should be noted that SARS didn’t cause a pandemic, either.

Without the benefit of hindsight, TFA’s argument that “there should have been work into vaccines and cures for SARS-type viruses just in case one of them ends up being a pandemic threat” could have just as easily been applied to Ebola. Ebola and SARS were never pandemic viruses, but the notion of a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of Ebola is a lot scarier than what we ended up with: a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of SARS.

> But, yes, rational and altruistic - I know we're not either of those things by and large. But if you asked your average USA citizen now if they wish NIH had been funded at something > $100 per person, I reckon you'd get a resounding affirmative.

And I think that’s something we can stand to learn from this. I think my overall point is that we can learn from our mistakes without playing the blame game over how they happened in the first place.

[Jedd]

> Something we can all be thankful for. It should be noted that SARS didn’t cause a pandemic, either.

Well no, but we didn't know it wouldn't at the time, of course. Which isn't really the point.

TFA's argument only makes objective sense in hindsight - after many missed opportunities, bungling, false starts, etc have manifested. That TFA only points this out after all these mistakes are made and the costs are being borne is a truism, not an astute observation.

> ... the notion of a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of Ebola is a lot scarier than what we ended up with ...

I totally disagree.

Ebola, as mentioned earlier, is sufficiently brutal, and known to be so, that it takes itself out of circulation relatively quickly and scares the living shinola out of the candidate carriers, so it dies out really quickly.

COVID19 OTOH has yet to be really experienced by most people, directly or indirectly, so the 20+ day incubation, and weird claims of mild flu-like and other misdirections are in its favour. (Excuse implicit anthropomorphism.)

And if we want to talk about something less deadly than Ebola, it's a very crowded field.

AFAICT Ebola's officially taken < 20,000 people (I may be wildly wrong here - it's hard to find good numbers). SARS-CoV-2 has (as of 2020-05-05) already taken an order of magnitude more than that - 252,000, and that's likely an under-estimate.

[forgot_my_pwd]

It certainly sounds like you have a pre-existing grudge, so I suppose this supports what I'm saying.

Why didn't the EU pour more resources into treatments and vaccines? I think I'm going to blame them.

See how that works?

[dang]

Hey, can you please not post/argue in the flamewar style on HN? It's not what this site is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.