The Market Is Leaving Us Unprepared for a Pandemic
As we face down what the World Health Organization calls “a new normal” of high-impact epidemics, researchers and public health officials find themselves at war with for-profit pharmaceutical companies.
In January, before the novel coronavirus COVID-19 had achieved official pandemic status, when it was still prompting little more than below-the-fold news articles about the outbreak in Wuhan, one spicy little quote in Nature from one of the world’s leading experts on this family of viruses, structural biologist Rolf Hilgenfeld, nevertheless stood out.
“The total number of people infected, if you combine SARS, MERS [previous related coronavirus outbreaks] and this new virus, is under 12,500 people. That’s not a market. The number of cases is too small. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested,” he told the scientific journal.
Hilgenfeld was on his way to Hubei province even as the Chinese government was placing the population of 57 million in Wuhan and surrounding cities under lockdown, or fēng chéng, to test early-stage drug candidates on animals infected by the new coronavirus, now designated SARS-COV-2.
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