This is what we fear it is. From Washington Post. Our lack of pandemic preparedness could prove deadly
“Policymakers need to pay much closer attention to the threats that could be posed by biologically engineered pathogens. There are still no licensed vaccines for most of the deadly viral pathogens that have occurred naturally in the past 40 years. That includes HIV, West Nile, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). A pathogen that combined the lethality of any of these diseases with the ability to spread like influenza could cause extraordinary illness and mortality.”
Vaccines for every creature that might pop up is an unrealistic goal.
I agree with Fauci. What we NEED is a deep and wide antiviral program to look for drugs that can be used to treat, immediately. We have one right now. Just not enough of it. Thanks to the search for antiHIV antivirals we know a LOT about how to do this now. 20 years ago we’d have been pie in the sky to even contemplate it. Now it’s a different story.
If we have to wait 2 or 3 months to develop a vaccine, another 6m to test it/etc we might have a world totally on fire and vaccines unable to be distributed at all. Not to mention if the country we use for raw materials is one of the first to go down for the count. And if we manage to misguess the vaccine, or the microbe mutates...it’s all over but the shouting at that point. Not to mention that any vaccine might have side effects we only see years down the line. Infertility, autoimmune diseases, etc. Might be trading frying pan for fire for a good % of the population.