When talking about health care priorities, it’s useful to look at which players would have which priorities. The question of “What should the NIH fund?”, “What should a big pharma company fund?” and “What should venture capitalist who are interested in funding health?” are three different ones.
If Pfizer thinks that they have a shoot at developing an antiviral, I think Pfizer should go for it. If there’s a startup that wants to develop an antiviral and a venture capitalist sees it as a viable business it makes sense to fund it.
Budgets are limited, and vaccine manufacturing is expensive.
Vaccine manufacturing is expensive when you do it with what are effectively cost-plus contracts. Synthesing peptides is cheap. Alhydrogel or similar adjuvants are cheap. The thing the RaDVaC people are doing is cheap.
The thing that’s not cheap is running clinical trials that cost hundreds of millions. This prevents vaccines that are cheap to manufacture from being commercially viable.
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I feel like 100 day plan goes completely around the real issues. Take for example:
We had a sophisticated international surveillance network that alerted the world to some unusual cases of “flu” in Wuhan, China in December 2019, that was able to share the genomic sequence and disease information even quicker than the 20 days it took.
A better question would be imagine a world where the organization that hosts our database of Coronavirus that we have for the purposes like vaccine development wouldn’t take down the database and give the data to nobody.
Alternatively, imagine a world where an organization who acts like that would be publicly criticized for doing that.
Imagine a world where when the NSA hacks into a lab because they believe there’s something fishy going on and they find that something fishy is going on, they would tell the US public. If we are to believe Shi who runs the WIV, the cyber attacks on the WIV started in September 2019 (she named the cyber attacks as the reason for why the database is down and it went down September 26 2019).
Given that this is UK policy and the UK is in the Five Eyes, the MI6 might have known and could have alerted the UK public.
We can discuss whether NSA/MI6 should generally have so much power to surveil everything but given that they do, saying nothing in the beginning and then telling journalists off the record that it was a lab leak seems like they are not doing the job they are supposed to
Imagine a world where when politicians speak about the dangers of the Delta variant we would immediately switch our vaccines to the spike protein of the Delta variant.
Their plan involves completely ignoring how screwed up the response was and still is. An abstract discussion doesn’t really do anything about how dysfunctional the institutions happen to be.
The strongest argument against antivirals is likely that someone is going to use them as a pretext for gain of function research.
There are a lot of points here, many of which I agree with, several of which I don’t, but none seem to address the questions I asked or points I made.
To very briefly respond,
First, yes, warning is critical, and being discussed, but doesn’t relate to the 100 day plan, which was formulated in case there is spread, i.e. warning systems failed.
Second, the plan expressly addresses the issues with slow clinical trials, and building new institutions to handle that.
And third, laboratory origins and the database deletion is so far off from the point I was thinking about deleting the comment.
And third, laboratory origins and the database deletion is so far off from the point I was thinking about deleting the comment.
That wouldn’t be the first time you did something in defense of the institutions that looks suspect retrospect.
I haven’t speaking about the laboratory origins directly.
If you don’t want to start in September start in October. We are currently asking the EcoHealth alliance to account for the reduced cellphone traffic in the WIV within October. How would we know now that they had reduced cellphone traffic if not through surveillance of the WIV by some agency within the Five Eyes? It seems like the passed that organization along sometime in July 2020, so that we can ask the EcoHealth alliance and the Chinese for an explanation.
Whether or not the WIV is the cause of the outbreak doesn’t change the fact that information like that should be passed on. If we could have asked the EcoHealth alliance in December 2020 to explain itself, that would have been much better.
Whether or not the WIV is actually the cause doesn’t change the fact that it’s very bad that they took a database that was created with international fund to be useful in a pandemic offline. If we can’t count of critical infrasturcture like that to be available during a pandemic, we can’t count on anything we build for our 100 day plan to be available as well.
Even if the WIV didn’t cause the outbreak both of those issues are relevant. Asking the EcoHealth alliance in 2021 about the anomalies is too late. The database not being available to defend ourselves against the pandemic is bad.
I’m not defending any institutions, or disagreeing with the point. But I mostly agree with your substantive claim, and I’m happy to talk about the question more - elsewhere.
I’m simply telling you it’s off topic. As the commenting guidelines should have made clear by now.
When talking about health care priorities, it’s useful to look at which players would have which priorities. The question of “What should the NIH fund?”, “What should a big pharma company fund?” and “What should venture capitalist who are interested in funding health?” are three different ones.
If Pfizer thinks that they have a shoot at developing an antiviral, I think Pfizer should go for it. If there’s a startup that wants to develop an antiviral and a venture capitalist sees it as a viable business it makes sense to fund it.
Vaccine manufacturing is expensive when you do it with what are effectively cost-plus contracts. Synthesing peptides is cheap. Alhydrogel or similar adjuvants are cheap. The thing the RaDVaC people are doing is cheap.
The thing that’s not cheap is running clinical trials that cost hundreds of millions. This prevents vaccines that are cheap to manufacture from being commercially viable.
___________________________
I feel like 100 day plan goes completely around the real issues. Take for example:
We had a sophisticated international surveillance network that alerted the world to some unusual cases of “flu” in Wuhan, China in December 2019, that was able to share the genomic sequence and disease information even quicker than the 20 days it took.
A better question would be imagine a world where the organization that hosts our database of Coronavirus that we have for the purposes like vaccine development wouldn’t take down the database and give the data to nobody.
Alternatively, imagine a world where an organization who acts like that would be publicly criticized for doing that.
Imagine a world where when the NSA hacks into a lab because they believe there’s something fishy going on and they find that something fishy is going on, they would tell the US public. If we are to believe Shi who runs the WIV, the cyber attacks on the WIV started in September 2019 (she named the cyber attacks as the reason for why the database is down and it went down September 26 2019).
Given that this is UK policy and the UK is in the Five Eyes, the MI6 might have known and could have alerted the UK public.
We can discuss whether NSA/MI6 should generally have so much power to surveil everything but given that they do, saying nothing in the beginning and then telling journalists off the record that it was a lab leak seems like they are not doing the job they are supposed to
Imagine a world where when politicians speak about the dangers of the Delta variant we would immediately switch our vaccines to the spike protein of the Delta variant.
Their plan involves completely ignoring how screwed up the response was and still is. An abstract discussion doesn’t really do anything about how dysfunctional the institutions happen to be.
The strongest argument against antivirals is likely that someone is going to use them as a pretext for gain of function research.
There are a lot of points here, many of which I agree with, several of which I don’t, but none seem to address the questions I asked or points I made.
To very briefly respond,
First, yes, warning is critical, and being discussed, but doesn’t relate to the 100 day plan, which was formulated in case there is spread, i.e. warning systems failed.
Second, the plan expressly addresses the issues with slow clinical trials, and building new institutions to handle that.
And third, laboratory origins and the database deletion is so far off from the point I was thinking about deleting the comment.
That wouldn’t be the first time you did something in defense of the institutions that looks suspect retrospect.
I haven’t speaking about the laboratory origins directly.
If you don’t want to start in September start in October. We are currently asking the EcoHealth alliance to account for the reduced cellphone traffic in the WIV within October. How would we know now that they had reduced cellphone traffic if not through surveillance of the WIV by some agency within the Five Eyes? It seems like the passed that organization along sometime in July 2020, so that we can ask the EcoHealth alliance and the Chinese for an explanation.
Whether or not the WIV is the cause of the outbreak doesn’t change the fact that information like that should be passed on. If we could have asked the EcoHealth alliance in December 2020 to explain itself, that would have been much better.
Whether or not the WIV is actually the cause doesn’t change the fact that it’s very bad that they took a database that was created with international fund to be useful in a pandemic offline. If we can’t count of critical infrasturcture like that to be available during a pandemic, we can’t count on anything we build for our 100 day plan to be available as well.
Even if the WIV didn’t cause the outbreak both of those issues are relevant. Asking the EcoHealth alliance in 2021 about the anomalies is too late. The database not being available to defend ourselves against the pandemic is bad.
I’m not defending any institutions, or disagreeing with the point. But I mostly agree with your substantive claim, and I’m happy to talk about the question more - elsewhere.
I’m simply telling you it’s off topic. As the commenting guidelines should have made clear by now.