It's disappointing to see how comments on this topic always center around whether masking worked or not and whether it was a lab leak or not. These just aren't that important in the grand scheme of things.
It's like we got in a car crash and instead of taking about how we can be safer drivers we're debating which brand of crutches is best.
I wish we'd zoom out a bit and look for some more impactful questions to ask. Questions like:
- How many fewer pandemics would we have if we stopped eating mammals?
- Does dwindling diversity among wild animals make for greater risk? (Presumably so, because the remaining ones start to look like a monoculture) How can we prioritize the types of conservation work that most effectively mitigate this?
- How much more effective could our vaccines be if we equipped people with the genes for CAS9? (Such that our vaccines could be CRISPR targeting RNA).
- How much better could our surveillance be if it were more common to sequence samples from sick people? How much cheaper does sequencing need to get before that can happen? Can we achieve that with policy alone or is there engineering work to do?
It's like we got in a car crash and instead of taking about how we can be safer drivers we're debating which brand of crutches is best.
I wish we'd zoom out a bit and look for some more impactful questions to ask. Questions like:
- How many fewer pandemics would we have if we stopped eating mammals?
- Does dwindling diversity among wild animals make for greater risk? (Presumably so, because the remaining ones start to look like a monoculture) How can we prioritize the types of conservation work that most effectively mitigate this?
- How much more effective could our vaccines be if we equipped people with the genes for CAS9? (Such that our vaccines could be CRISPR targeting RNA).
- How much better could our surveillance be if it were more common to sequence samples from sick people? How much cheaper does sequencing need to get before that can happen? Can we achieve that with policy alone or is there engineering work to do?