
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented - aberoham
https://www.virology.ws/2020/04/30/the-sars-cov-2-pandemic-could-have-been-prevented/
======
dogma1138
I’m not sure why this was flagged Vincent Racaniello is a pretty well known
immunologist he is the one behind the discovery of PVR (the discovery of the
polio receptor allowed his team to develop a technique for animal models for
viruses that only infect humans such as polio which is still used today to
study diseases that do not have other natural hosts) and the mechanisms for
interferon immunity in viruses.

------
est31
I really hope that this is the lesson we get from the Covid-19 pandemic. To
develop a series of easily manufacturable antivirals against all potentially
pandemic causing viruses. It will cost a couple of billions but Covid-19 alone
has cost us trillions already.

~~~
tachyonbeam
I hope that, as a result of this, those in power realize that we need to
invest more in biotech. It seems to me that government pour too much money
into things like deep learning research (which will serve to eliminate jobs
and enable a surveillance state), and not enough in research that could save
lives and eliminate illnesses.

We really should have the capability to develop and mass-manufacture
antivirals much faster, ideally in the span of a few weeks. We understand the
basic physics involved, we can do protein folding and I assume we can simulate
how well synthetic molecules bind to proteins. Why don't we have this
technological capability? It seems it really should be within the realm of
what we're capable of achieving.

~~~
sanxiyn
This is exactly the goal of DARPA's Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program.

[https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-
platform](https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform)

I am constantly surprised how often the answer to why aren't we funding this
really ambitious but also really impactful project? is yup, DARPA is funding
it, but nobody else is, and we probably should increase DARPA funding by 10x.

------
wallflower
Even if it could have been prevented, there is significant probability that
another novel virus could arise from bat or other reservoirs in the future.
Similar to how H1N1 better prepared certain countries who experienced it, this
could be the wake-up call that was needed to help future generations survive a
much worse virus by getting them more used to a life where being in a crowd is
not normal. There are very few people alive who lived through the previous
1918 pandemic. This is our 1918 or, at least, a strong warning.

~~~
kitotik
Are you implying that the 1918 pandemic resulted in some sort of lesson
learned or a fundamental shift in culture?

~~~
wallflower
We are all living through this in real-time. A few of us even know people who
have died from COVID-19 [1]. For the first time in a long time, on a large
scale, many people are experiencing the effects of normalcy bias, even if they
don't it is called that particular term. [2] Good or bad, we are all seeing
the results of having a global supply chain. For the first time in a long
time, most of us know people who are unemployed for reasons that are beyond
their control. We are seeing acutely the benefits of a social safety net. [3]
For the first time in a very long time, with few exceptions, people are not
experiencing FOMO as it relates to the innocent but probing "what are you
doing this weekend?" or "what did you do this weekend?", as people simply
cannot "go out on a Friday" like they did just a couple months ago. The whole
casual Tinder hookup culture is undergoing a sea change in the temporary era
of social distancing, as kissing is a known probable vector for virus
transmission. Let alone, having a date in a restaurant is a vaguer memory
every passing day.

The Internet, broadly speaking, is fueling a return to creativity not seen
widely since the days of MySpace. Creativity almost always thrives under
constraint. For example, Russian isolation art [4].

Finally, for those who are saying we'll forget about this in two years...
(normalcy bias) what if there is ultimately no successful vaccine and just a
set of treatments that are fairly to moderately successful once you are
infected?

[1] > The CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook provides readers with a look at the
impact pandemic flu events have had on both survivors and the families and
friends of non-survivors. These stories are not folklore, but personal
recollections.

[https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-
coronavir...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavirus-
labor-help.html)

[4] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-
Faceb...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Facebook-art-
parodies.html)

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
There was no vaccine for the Spanish Flu either. We didn't even know what
_caused_ the flu at the time, had no particular reason other than the course
of past pandemics to believe it would recede, and in many places got hit with
3 waves of it. But once it did recede (and in some places even before it
receded!) people were chomping at the bit to go out.

It just seems unrealistic to propose that, after humanity survived plague and
smallpox and tuberculosis, a disease less deadly than all of them will be what
ends our general willingness to physically interact with each other.

~~~
wallflower
> our general willingness to physically interact with each other

In the best outcome, there is a successful vaccine. Even Introverts Gone Wild.
The Roaring Twenties all over again, as another commenter mentioned.

In the worst outcome, we learn to live with COVID-19 or its offshoots, forcing
each person to take into a risk calculation and mitigation measures for
meeting others, especially in crowds.

In all outcomes, humanity will survive. Even if the Contagion virus, which was
modeled after the Nipah virus with 80%+ mortality rates in certain break outs,
becomes a reality in the future, there will always be survivors.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The Roaring Twenties happened in the absence of a vaccine or even
pharmaceutical treatment. Every person was forced to take a risk calculation,
and for most people the result of that calculation was "idk epidemics happen
sometimes let's go dancing". Unless the average person has become radically
more risk averse in the past century, we'll be prepared to ignore the virus in
the medium to long term, no matter how good our response is now.

------
aberoham
This is by by Vincent Racaniello, a professor of Microbiology & Immunology at
Columbia University.

I highly recommend his podcast, This Week in Virology, aka TWiV.

Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?

~~~
est31
> Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?

Youtube STT is pretty good. You can open the autogenerated transcripts on
youtube page, select all and copy them to a file.

[https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-
you...](https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-
video)

Second the recommendation. I've been watching his virology lectures. Teaches
you a lot about viruses, although it sometimes contains organic chemistry that
I don't know about, but outside of that it's great:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEzNoWL0Cso1jip)

------
pmorici
This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-
funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year.
I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't
seem like they are some small agency starved for money.

~~~
Jedd
> This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is
> "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion
> dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded
> but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money.

Compare the cost of this kind of pandemic, which was generally agreed as
likely to happen at some point.

Or consider it in a _per capita_ context -- about US$100 per citizen of the
USA.

Given this, and given what the USA spends most of its money on, I agree with
TFA - the NIH is woefully underfunded.

------
seventytwo
Guys, this is a natural disaster. The blame game about causality is fucking
stupid. Mitigation and response is all that matters because it’s all that’s
actually under our (humanity’s) control.

~~~
balladeer
Indeed. But should we not even discuss, instead, about something like this?

 _One of the treating physicians, Dr. Li Wenliang, warned some colleagues
about the new illness on December 31. Instead of spreading the word about the
new pathogen and dispatching the country’s top infectious disease detectives
to Wuhan, the police arrested Dr. Li and accused him of “spreading rumors.” He
died on February 7 from the coronavirus that he contracted while treating
patients. It took China’s president Xi Jinping until January 7 to order his
top medical officials to investigate the outbreak. They publicly denied it was
communicable person-to-person. That allowed Chinese lunar New Year
celebrations and holiday breaks to go ahead as planned, sending infected
people from Wuhan around the country and across the planet._

[https://lithub.com/on-the-near-impossibility-of-planning-
for...](https://lithub.com/on-the-near-impossibility-of-planning-for-a-viral-
pandemic/)

~~~
throw334532
China notified the WHO on the same day, December 31.

The WHO did not deny person-to-person transmission. They said there was no
direct evidence yet.

After China locked down on January 23, some countries took months before
acting.

------
SiebenHeaven
There's thousand such threats to humanity that need to be prevented even right
now. The real problem is determining which threat is real and prioritising.
Think of it like you are a celebrity. You recieve thousands of threats daily,
most of these are just threats which will never realise. The problem is
identifying which ones will and acting on those to prevent them.

------
forgot_my_pwd
I suppose if you already have a grudge against the US you can pick and choose
which facts you focus on to try to piece together a narrative that blames the
US for this... But of course that narrative is extremely flimsy.

Assigning blame to any one country for a pandemic which is affecting literally
the entire world is petty and disingenuous.

All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

~~~
Jedd
I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking
the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced
medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources.

TFA wasn't assigning blame _for the pandemic_ per se, from my reading, but was
pointing out the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+)
research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone
in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd
have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it
wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma.

> All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

For most of the 190+ countries on the planet, that would be true for very
small values of 'more'.

~~~
philwelch
> I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking
> the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced
> medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources.

Sure.

> the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research
> not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the
> field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have
> more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't
> financially attractive to for-profit pharma.

I don't think it's just profit motive that caused those lines of research to
be dropped. SARS was effectively eradicated and MERS was mostly contained.
Sure there was a pandemic risk, but there were also pandemic risks with
influenza and ebola, both of which saw lots of research and active
countermeasures. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS was spreading to the tune of over a
million cases per year. If you're a rational, altruistic person trying to make
a decision about where to focus investment in antiviral research at this point
in time, you had a lot of reasons to invest in HIV, a lot of reasons to invest
in influenza, and maybe only a few long-shot reasons to invest in Ebola or
coronaviruses. At its peak HIV was an immediate death sentence that over a
million people on Earth got every year. I think it would have been a hard sell
at the time to try and divert funds away from addressing that problem just in
case there was a sequel to SARS that couldn't be stopped the same way SARS
was.

~~~
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.

------
wintorez
I fear that this pandemic eventually passes and we learn nothing from it.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
In fairness, over the long run, we don't really "learn" anything from any
major world events. Human nature is human nature, and we'll always prioritize
the immediate threats over something vague and in the future. It's why climate
change is virtually inevitable.

------
typon
No it couldn't have been prevented under the current system of global
capitalism. No market forces means no research done by private companies. This
kind of forward thinking project requires billions of dollars of funding by
the government into large-scale public programs - something the US public has
been allergic to since the 80s.

Preventing another pandemic means rethinking how the incentives in this
current system are structured.

~~~
tachyonbeam
I agree that it's a matter of changing the incentives. It seems possible
though. Governments are pulling trillions of dollars out of thin air for
relief measures. They have the ability to print money and have been expanding
the money supply since there has been money. It's a matter of allocating said
money to the right things. Maybe instead of keeping zombie companies alive
through zero-interest debt, we should be letting badly managed companies die,
and fund critical research instead, as well as infrastructure projects. That
would create jobs and help us build a better future.

------
alex_young
There's an easier way to prevent animal nexus illnesses. This includes SARS,
COVID, MERS, Ebola, E Coli, and many others. This change would have a
byproduct of massively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the
life expectancy of billions of people.

Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this.

It requires a switch to a plant based diet.

It's really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would
personally benefit them and everyone around them.

EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I'm happy to hear your alternate
opinion.

~~~
kart23
I believe you need to have some sort of privilege to switch to a plant based
diet. It's not cheap, especially in america where fast food is so accessible,
cheap, and satisfying. Fresh produce is expensive and calories per dollar
doesnt make any sense. Sure beans and grain sounds great, but in practice gets
boring very quickly.

I agree with you that switching to a plant based diet is better for the
environment and would prevent 99% of these diseases, but most people simply
dont have the resources to do so, and the cultural dependence on meat will be
near impossible to change.

~~~
redisman
There's no way it's more expensive in a free (with externalities priced-in)
market. Meat eats plants in a very lossy fashion. The main problem for your
average Joe is that it's quite hard to get started cooking tasty meals this
way. I've tried many times and I can kinda manage with these frozen "patties"
and such but it's just hard to flip thousands of years of cooking tradition.
You can tell when you have some Ethiopian or Indian veggie food that it's been
honed to perfection over centuries. Where I'm from all the dishes include meat
or animal fat/broth which is honestly even harder to replace than the protein.

When you go from chicken broth or bacon fat to a vegetable broth or coconut
butter, it's just a jump too far to make the dish still make any sense and
that's the kind of moments where most people give up.

------
KCUOJJQJ
>A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I
trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic.

Would it make sense to test this drug on 80 year old people who are also ill?
Usually young healthy people get the drugs in these trials AFAIK.

------
dathinab
Developing protection medicine against all potential bad pandemic viri in
animals, it even just the ones we know of which at just a small party is only
possible in theory.

In practice even a union of all first world countries can't afford it as far
as I know.

There is also the problem about constant mutations.

E.g. after the SARS-Cov outbreak medicine against it was development. But it
couldn't be used efficiently against SARS-Cov-2 . Through it likely did reduce
the amount of time so need until we get a vaccine.

So putting money into developing vaccines for all kind of latent viruses makes
sense for gaining knowledge. _But it 's not cable is preventing pandemies._

------
philwelch
Alright so the most absurd leap in reasoning is probably here:

> In one scenario, we have stockpiles of a pan-CoV antiviral drug, enough to
> treat millions of people. When SARS-CoV-2 is first identified in Wuhan, the
> drug is immediately given a large phase II efficacy trial....

> It’s easy to blame bats for unwittingly giving humanity SARS-CoV-2. But I
> also blame both big Pharma and the US government for failing to come up with
> a pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine.

Why single out the _US_ government in particular with the responsibility to
come up with a "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" that should have been on hand to
treat an outbreak in _Wuhan_? I'm not saying the NIH shouldn't have worked on
it, but there were other countries with the ability and incentive to do so.
There was nothing stopping China, Taiwan, or Canada from doing something after
SARS, or South Korea from doing something after MERS, so why aren't any of
those countries equally to blame?

There's the further speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was originally released due to
some lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that's true, it only
further undermines this Monday morning quarterbacking, because it would mean
that one of the countries with the most vested interest in preventing this
pandemic, and one of the best equipped to do something about it, was _actually
trying to do that_ only to be undone by some procedural blunder.

There's also a huge degree of hindsight here. Pandemics tend to occur from
time to time, and we're barely on the verge of having the tech level necessary
to prevent them. Up to and including 2019, we had a couple of near-misses with
coronaviruses, but we also had near-misses with influenza and Ebola among
others. If the US or anyone else somehow managed to come up with some "pan-CoV
antiviral or vaccine" only to fall victim to an influenza or Ebola pandemic,
I'm sure some wise guy would be going around telling us how stupid they were
for not being better prepared. In reality, the world has collectively gone to
heroic measures to try and snuff out these outbreaks when and where they
initially occur before they turn into pandemics.

Speaking of which, there's an elephant in the room. Maybe the US government
didn't sufficiently invest in speculative countermeasures against a potential
epidemic. But, starting in 2003, they _did_ invest in countermeasures against
the _actual_ epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and managed to save over 17 million lives.
In fact, Drs. Fauci and Birx have both been personally involved with that
program for many years.

I'm not saying the US did everything right, but in some sense the world got a
really bad break with COVID-19 if you look at where virology efforts were
focused. And our shortcomings in terms of public health policy would have been
the same for any pandemic.

------
roenxi
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.

~~~
wpietri
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."

~~~
philwelch
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.

------
paypalcust83
{C,Sh,W}oulda

------
empath75
> The viral outbreak could have been stopped in December in Wuhan had we had
> the foresight and financial support to develop antiviral drugs or vaccines.

It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing
exactly that.

~~~
c3534l
Unfortunately to say, the President of the United States is not a reliable
source. US intelligence agencies said Trump is wrong, and without any further
evidence, it should be placed in the conspiracy theory category.

~~~
bpodgursky
Here's the best collection of evidence that accidental release from WIV should
be viewed as a plausible vector: [https://project-
evidence.github.io/](https://project-evidence.github.io/) Nothing in here can
reasonably be classified as a conspiracy theory.

The US intelligence agencies haven't said anything to my knowledge about
accidental release. They said it didn't appear to be an engineered virus
(true) and that there was no evidence that it did come from the lab (true).

But what that misses, is that there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that
exactly this class of disease was being studied (bat coronaviruses, research
on animal to human transmission, including forced mutation to encourage this)
a few hundred yards from the wet market in question, and this lab had
explicitly been called out for sloppy handling of dangerous biological
materials.

(and to be clear, this isn't some dark secret research -- it's public albeit
controversial research on preventing pandemics, funded by the NIH.)

~~~
tigershark
That is not evidence if it has been debunked in several scientific papers.
This is one of them with the analysis of the virus genoma:
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1733440)

~~~
bpodgursky
You have not even slightly tried to read or understand what I posted.

This is (weak) evidence that the virus was not engineered. It says absolutely
nothing about the possibility -- which I outlined clearly, and which is
outlined clearly in the linked doc -- that this is a natural virus
accidentally released from a lab.

~~~
tigershark
I read it. There are a bunch of papers that are presented as proof of how it
was engineered spreading bullshit, plus some fact narrated in the typical
conspiracy theorist modus operandi to convince people of something that is
very, very unlikely.

~~~
bpodgursky
I'm sorry, but it's simply not possible to square your comments with the
content as presented. Let me quote it directly, in case you missed it:

> Studies proving the virus was not "engineered" do not prove the spillover
> event occured outside of a laboratory. We are not claiming the virus was
> engineered. They also do not prove that the spillover event did not involve
> an animal or organism sourced from one of these labs.

> To start with, we will once again state that we are not claiming SARS-CoV-2
> has been engineered.

> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the
> basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19
> was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe
> that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

I'd like to engage on this, but it's pretty clear you aren't discussing this
in good faith, or even reading the content you're talking about, so I'm going
to have to step out.

