[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.