Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
It was widely known among epidemiologists that a coronavirus based outbreak was just a matter of time. A more serious society could have done way more.
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With just the tools we had: The US had a program to distribute masks that was never activated. Cancelling international flights earlier, and actually quarantining cities, could have limited it to just a handful of cities outside of China. We could have distributed vaccines everywhere instead of enforcing international bans on vaccines developed by US pharma companies.
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With governments that take public health seriously: Coronavirus outbreaks were a known risk; preemptive vaccine research could have been funded more, leading to faster vaccine development turnarounds when a variant started infecting humans.
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With a more serious society overall: We could do planned two month global lockdowns once a decade or so, and eliminate COVID, the flu, the common cold, a vast number of unnamed respiratory illnesses, and more.
Just serious quarantines would have made a difference instead we had lockdowns where people would just go mill around walmart because they’re bored
We didn’t do lockdowns in the west. We did half-lockdowns. Go ahead and ask a rancher about “half-locking” the gates of the cow pen closed and how effective that is in containment
Lockdowns should never have been self-policed, optional, based on social shame as a motivator. They should have been government enforced, mandatory and based on force as a motivator with all costs covered by the state and food/medicine/etc provided for free during the lockdown period. All the squealing whining hogs would be quite upset but who cares about them, slam the book down and it will all be over soon and they can get back to their treats like Wuhan managed. They would have ultimately preferred to rip the bandaid off than have 3 years of half-assed lockdowns and culture war.
I genuinely believe a socialist world-republic could have done zero-covid indefinitely. It was effective in China until the let-it-rip policies of most of the capitalist world kept it circulating and mutating. Communism could probably eradicate many diseases just with quarantines.
