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Comment by godelmachine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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