Re: Whilst We’re On the Topic...
"Why hasn’t the forecasts of people like Bill Gates (who basically predicted this entire situation 5 years ago) not turned into academic research into what to do about it?"
Are you serious? What Bill Gates said boils down to "There will come a pandemic at some point relatively soon, and when it does, we won't be able to handle it". Well, of course. That's a relatively obvious thing to everyone. And that's fine, because he was not called on to be a predictive epidemiologist. He was stating a generality because his point was a general one. However, he did not "predict this entire situation". If this counts as a complete prediction, I'd like to get my own in here. How's this:
There will come a time, probably sooner than we'd like, when a war happens. The war may be a world war or it may be a localized one that many nations wisely stay away from, but it will involve at least two modern economies with large militaries. When this war happens, we are not prepared for the pain that will be created by unexpected weapon technologies and tactics as well as disruption to globalized processes. It will be very unpleasant when that happens. We should do something about this.
When I'm proven correct, I want to be similarly lauded as a visionary who accurately predicted the Chinese-American war, or the Russo-Euro war, or the Persian-Australian-Indian war or the Eurasian war of 2028 or the Transpacific war or the war of the missiles or whatever it's called. I predicted it back near the end of March 2020; all of you are witnesses.
Now, to answer your question. Why didn't a generality by Gates turn into academic research? Do you mean more academic research? Because there was already a lot of academic research on epidemiology and microbiology. Thousands of papers are printed every year from diligent researchers. If you're only referring to new research, there are two primary ways of increasing the quantity of research being done: 1) increase the number of researchers and 2) increase the funding for existing researchers so they're never lacking for resources. If we were supposed to do the former, we haven't had enough time to increase the entry rate of properly-educated researchers, which takes years. If the latter, you have a better point, but you would need to ask the various places that fund such research. Many of those places have been increasing funding. Many that haven't simply cannot--they're already donating what they can. Plenty have decreased funding, and you can be angry with them if you like, but that is the nature of academic funding and your complaints will not help to change it. Since it's such a large field, their efforts are spread out across it, which isn't helpful right now when we wished they spent all their time looking at respiratory viruses, but would have been great in the possible alternate timeline where we were dealing with persistent antibiotic-resistant bacteria that cause neurological damage. So you name the thing that should have happened, and who should have done it, and we can argue about why it didn't happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
