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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

His facts might be right but his tone is unreasonable. This epidemic started in China, neighbor to India. Those two countries are home to something like 20-25% of the worlds human resources and are basically on the doorstep of being advanced world-striding superpowers. China in particular is becoming a technological colossus and India is already a major player when it comes to actually producing these drugs.

Assigning the blame on the NIH or US funding would be fine in the 1980s; but this is really an issue for the Asians to take leadership on. China was in a much better position to study all these viruses. The US failed on disease screening for incoming travelers.

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Pandemics are a global problem, and can start anywhere. Everybody should be working on this. It's not like the US doesn't have bats or birds or pigs, all sources of previous pandemics. The US has long been a medical research leader, and now especially doesn't seem like a great time to say, "Ah, whatever, let somebody else deal with it."

Sure, that’s a fair point. And it’s the perfect argument for where the US did end up focusing a lot of research and aid, namely on Ebola. Another SARS or MERS outbreak would likely originate in a developed country with a track record of successfully eradicating that type of coronavirus, whereas Ebola is a problem for a part of the world that is much less developed and ill-equipped to handle such a crisis.

It’s obvious now that we should have invested more into all pandemic risks including coronaviruses, but it’s an exaggeration to imply that the US wasn’t doing anything at all or that the priorities of US-funded research and aid were poorly chosen based on what was known at the time.

I don’t understand why are you dragging India into this

Start at Wuhan. Draw a big circle around it; 2 Chinas large. Anyone in that circle with the ability to develop general antivirals and vaccines were the ones who could be assigned a notional responsibility. I picked on India because I'd heard it produces a lot of medicine and they have enough smart people to accomplish anything. As I stare at Google maps, Japan and Korea probably have the capability as well.

If Europe and the US can have ready-to-go antivirals for every possible disease ever then they are encouraged to do that; but realistically for a virus from an Asian reserve it is reasonable to expect the antivirals will be researched and produced in Asia. Can't be ready for everything; and the US should probably be focusing on possible pandemics from Africa where the locals don't have the sort of technical mastery found in Asia.

We are literally not talking about a wildfire in a neighbouring country. It's a human to human transmissible pandemic in "2020". And then factor in geopolitics: Indo-China border movement, compared with Chinese people travelling to countries in the west (or other countries around China). Actually you could have said this for India-Nepal, even India-Bhutan, and maybe India-Bangladesh as well; but not China and India.

If it is impossible for India to preemptively develop an antiviral then it is crazy to think the US could. India and China are 2/3 of the world's top 3 economies (after purchasing power adjustments). Arguably China is now the US's superior. And as mentioned something like a quarter of the world's population They don't need the States to step in to fund vaccine development.

It isn't reasonable to blame the US government/big pharma for not preemptively curing all possible diseases. It isn't a sensible standard. If they can then they should, but they probably can't. If they can they should be starting in Africa rather than Asia.

If I converted the currencies correctly, India's annual government spending is about 10% of the US's.

Sorry, but the US has (had?) the world strongest economy and owns right to being the home of the dollar , the currency all others are measured against.

It’s crazy to me to cry poor now, especially like the author said, trillions have been spent now, not billions on economic remedies which are likely to fail.

This was just ignorance and a lack of foresight from administrations who had issues “trusting the science”.

It’s going to be the same scenario in the US with regards to climate change, all the economic ability to tackle the issue head on early, existed, so little has been done.

Also remember, the author is talking about the past, you can’t really blame China or India from 15 years ago not to have taken more appropriate action, they weren’t the economic powers they are today. Besides, why t try pass the blame?

I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA. It is scary to me what will happen to those essential tools as the USA continues to deteriorate.

Also, China was prepared for this epidemic. They experienced SARS. They knew there would be a SARS-2 sooner or later. They had lockdown plans ready to go for this. They had a huge research facility specialising in this threat where they thought it might occur.

Do you think they might just not yet to have the technical and intellectual facilities to do what is described in the article though?

China is an advancing country but America does have some pretty insanely good tech and researchers.

China probably lacks the decades of institutional knowledge that the USA has. As much as us young ones complain (in anglo-saxon developed countries), there is something to be said for the old men who chair the committees and head the labs. They have a lot of experience.

> I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA.

It's not like that reputation and research has all gone to waste. The US has developed a lot of antiviral drugs. Some notable examples include many of the antiretrovirals that have been used to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the influenza antiviral drug Tamiflu which multiple countries have proactively stockpiled in case of an influenza pandemic, and remdesivir, which was originally invented as an Ebola antiviral but might actually be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

China and Asia can take leadership for sure, but it doesn’t mean that the US / the west shouldn’t.

Viruses do not care about passports as long as the world is connected it’s everyone’s problem.

The US and the west had good candidates for SARS and MERS vaccines overall only a single team continued to work on them the Oxford one and that’s mostly because Saudi Arabia was still interested in funding it.

SARS should’ve been a wake up call and if it wasn’t enough then MERS less then a decade later should’ve been an indication that SARS wasn’t a black swan event.

We had two examples within an extremely short time frame of how coronaviruses can mutate to become as deadly or even more deadly than pandemic causing influenza strains and for the most part the western world decided it’s not a priority.

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