A legitimate comparison is the 1918 flu pandemic.
If Covid doesn’t go away on its own, it will provide the necessary impetus to fund development of broad-spectrum antivirals.
Based on the work over the last 60+ years developing such broad-spectrum antivirals will take at least 10-15 years if it is even possible (and that doesn’t account that most big pharma have left the anti-viral field over the last 10 years and small biotechs can’t develop it on their own due to the pricing structures of antivirals). It’s clear from the paper that the author hasn’t worked in the industry or knows how to discover and develop drugs (especially antivirals)
I see no reason to be so pessimistic. My impression is that the money’s all been going to virus-specific vaccines. And 15 years is not forever.
After having worked in this field I don’t share any optimism (not only from a financial but also scientific perspective). We will go way too far off-topic why broad-spectrum compounds aren’t really favorable and more selective (but still reasonable broad) compounds are very difficult to find (and that doesn’t even include that antivirals can’t be sold at oncology drug prices)
At this point people recognize that this research is an investment in economic and national security. We’ll see in a few years whether your pessimism is still warranted.
If history has shown anything repeatedly it is that people forget even the worst things after a very short time
I agree that what you say is true about many things. (Consider the past four years, for instance, pre-Biden.) But this is different. It doesn’t quite reach the same level as a war, but it’s right up there. I don’t think people will soon forget the Great Pandemic of '20-'21; not even a generation from now. And far beyond that it’ll have a chapter of its own in every history book. This has been an event of monumental, historic proportions. I hope that Robert is right.
They won’t forget the pandemic but in 6-12 months nobody wants to invest many, many billions to develop drugs to prevent the next pandemic. People will just say that next time vaccines will be developed fast again without understanding that we were just lucky - people don’t realize that some of the most experienced pharma companies in the vaccine field also tried to develop covid vaccines and failed miserably, e.g Merck, GSK etc. Soon nobody wants to hear this and it will be again just a matter of time until we have the next pandemic and we will be again unprepared (it is not like those happen just every 100 years as we had quite a few pandemics in the last 100 years but were just lucky those were less contagious)
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Well, that’s certainly what’s happened in the relatively recent past (more than once, as you pointed out), and it’s a big part of how we got here with covid-19; i.e., unprepared.
I’m hoping that Biden’s people will step up to the plate and adopt a longer-term perspective, with commensurate long-term action. I think that’s what Robert was alluding to as well.
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All the scientific news from the Biden guys point towards less focus on pandemic in the future and more towards cancer. Without doubt it is important to move forward with possible approaches towards cancer but that is an area where industry already invest heavily and so pumping more money into it through the government into academic (and industrial) research won’t accelerate it too much. In addition, cancer is such an heterogeneous disease that there will never be a “golden bullet” (or even ten of them). They will overturn some of the decisions from Trump wrt pandemic preparation and bring it back to the Obama level (and otherwise hope that industry will be interested to solve the drug development problem (which is unlikely)but that will be it)
This isn’t like anything in living memory except maybe for supercentenarians. Nobody’s going to forget that for over a year their kids were out of school, or that they couldn’t go to work or much of anywhere else, or that their employees couldn’t come to work, or that their favorite restaurants and retailers went out of business, or that their own businesses went bankrupt or closed, or the friends, relatives, coworkers, and neighbors who were hospitalized or died.
In this context, I’m certain that recent history (notably what happened after SARS, which infected a little over 8,000 people and killed under 800) is not going to repeat itself. In the US alone we’ve had over 30 million infections and 500,000 deaths. That’s like ten Vietnam Wars.
Still doing better than countries with much tighter restrictions, and deaths have not tracked cases.
Infectious disease experts have said the results should not be seen as evidence that lockdowns were unnecessary, but acknowledged they may indicate Sweden’s overall stance on fighting the pandemic may have some aspects worth studying.
You would think that a vaccination effort that prioritized the elderly would eventually start having an impact on the number of deaths. People aged 60 and over have made up around 96 percent of the deaths in Sweden. People under 50 less than 1 percent. Of course, the percentage of the population that is fully vaccinated in Sweden is still in the single digits and about a third of the number for the US. The people who are currently getting the vaccine in Sweden are typically in their 70s or older. The load on the health care system is still severe and a few days ago, the Uppsala Region announced that it has the highest number of patients in intensive care since beginning of the pandemic. As a result, a “personal lockdown” recommendation was issued with rules that are similar to what’s been in place in California all along. In fact, two meters for social distancing is slightly longer. Punch line: “Assume that everybody you meet is infected.”
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In addition, it’s again not only about death and due to the much higher percentage of infected people in Sweden compared to it’s neighbors (and many other countries) Sweden also experiences quite an impact from long covid cases.
An important phrase in the article you posted (but didn’t mention in your comments) vis-à-vis medical conditions among some in the population who’ve had covid, and “long-haul” covid aftereffects:
Because Covid-19 is still a relatively new illness and little is known about its long-term effects, it’s not clear if these are related.
I.e., the author is saying that we should wait until cause and effect have been firmly established before drawing conclusions in that regard, in other words.
Also, as I said in an earlier recent post, and can be seen in Robert’s plots, “lots of new cases, very few deaths” in Sweden. Daily deaths have plummeted to a rolling 7-day average of about 3 or so lately, even as cases have gone up since the end of January. The two plots are pretty dramatic that way.
And the Swedes, being the culture that they are, will respond as best possible with the new voluntary “lockdown” recommendation (for the Uppsala area), as they have with other transmission mitigation measures. They aren’t being forced into it by government mandate.
Really? In S. CA, it’s estimated that about 30% have had covid and recovered. Another 30% have been vaccinated with at least one dose. (I’m going on memory for both of those numbers, but they’re something like that.) And not all of the remaining people are infected at any given time. So maybe the punch line should be revised somewhat? That’s soooo 2020.
If you bothered to look at the official stats, you would see that the latest number is 18, not 3.
https://fhm.se
Maybe you should convey that to the medical authorities in Uppsala. They included the punch line in their lockdown recommendation a few days ago. I’m sure you understand the situation there a lot better than them.