There are medicines right now.
Japan has offered 20K patients worth of Favipiravir to WHO for use in West Africa. So far? Crickets from WHO.
It stopped ebola in lab animals after symptoms appeared.
They offered it a month ago. If it’s found to be effective there should be some WHO bureaucrats decorating lamp posts when this is all over.
There is no money, however, in a lot of research into medications for viruses. Medications aren’t indemnified, vaccines are. Medications expire from patent, vaccines do not. Medications aren’t mandated, vaccines are.
There is simply not the ‘carrot’ there for pharma to develop antiviral medications.
Vaccine tech on the other hand is hoppin’.
The issue with weaponization (and these kits can be had for a few thousands of dollars now and if you haven’t been in grad school in the sciences in the US you’ll be delighted to know that most of the grad students are either Chinese or Middle Eastern) is ease of availability of the equipment to manipulate genes. It’s not *quite* walmart scaled yet, but it’s close.
20 years ago I’d agree that the terrorists didn’t have the ability or training to manipulate a viral genome for evil. I don’t agree with that statement now. At all.
Saddam had a bioweapons research facility or two. Those staff and techs went somewhere...
And in the case of ebola, nature is doing that pretty efficiently on her own. This particular strain is only 97% identical to the one in 1976. That 3% is the difference between humans and chimps. The vaccine we develop against this outbreak may well be useless against the next one in 5 years.
And does nothing to protect against any of the other strains of ebola. Or many other hemorrhagic fevers. Or any of the rna viruses in general.
This is a case of where we have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail.
And the cost to just vaccinate Africa’s 1B people would be $50B for a $50 vaccine. It’s more like several hundred dollars for new vaccines now.
And that’s just for one strains of one hemorrhagic fever.
We’ll run out of money long before we run out of jungle diseases to vaccinate against.
"Saddam had a bioweapons research facility or two. Those staff and techs went somewhere..."