Well the good news is that now that we have mRNA vaccine technology we can develop vaccines just as fast as those viruses come.

It blows my mind that we had the coronavirus sequenced the first weekend after it was discovered, and the first current, same-as-in-production-now Moderna vaccine ready in February of last year, before the epidemic even came to the U.S. All the time since then was spent on clinical trials and ramping up manufacturing capacity.

But now that the mRNA platform up and running, I expect subsequent vaccines for new viruses can move through the process much faster, if need be.

Yes mRNA gives us some good weapons against future viruses. More important than that would be to react quicker when a new pandemic looms. Make sure that all air travel is checked (the US banned travel from China, while infected people would arrive from Europe...), be quick with local lockdowns while the virus isn't spread around the country. Especially, watch out early for local outbreaks.

Also improvements to public health information systems. It seems like there are a lot of people employed in public health in the US across the local, state and federal levels and those people are not served by good systems.

The fact that for most of the pandemic, a volunteer effort run by The Atlantic magazine was better at reporting disease statistics than the CDC is a flashing red sign.

My own county’s system seemed designed for tracing and reporting a handful of cases per week for TB outbreaks or the like and was knocked over when the COVID surges happened.

>(the US banned travel from China, while infected people would arrive from Europe...)

It's worse than that. We banned some non-citizens from entering the US if they had been in China, we did not ban travel from China.

Depends on the virus.

Coronavirus is an "easy" one to create a vaccine against. HIV would be the toughest one, regular approaches don't work, which is why we don't have a vaccine despite 30 years of trying.

For HIV you need a different approach, called "germ-line targetting", where instead of presenting the virus, you are trying to direct the evolution of antibody producing cells towards a specific kind which is able to produce working antibodies. If you just present the virus, you get useless antibodies.

So if we are hit by a "hard" virus like HIV, mRNA vaccines will be useless, since it takes years to figure out that germ line targeting.

The optimism around the mRNA vaccines should be tempered: there are reports of coronavirus vaccines causing heart inflammation (particularly in youngsters); and causing substantial changes in the immune responses. These admittedly infrequent or possibly benign consequences will need to be understood much better for mRNA vaccines to become mainstream.

I wonder how much head start the Chinese labs had vs February of 2020 in terms of sequencing the virus. (I'm not trying to make any remotely xenophobic claims here, but it seems like there is substantial evidence that something unusual was happening in Wuhan as early as late fall of 2019.)

The rest of your comment stands strongly, but I'm not so sure about "the first weekend" as being entirely correct and repeatable.

the formulation of the vaccine was very fast and relatively simple compared to the 12+ year span required to understand the virus to the extent that a working vaccine could be formulated.

we were lucky with this one, and we need to put more effort into surveillance of novel pathogenic threats and facillitate investigation regarding molecular characteristics

if this pandemic involved a pathogen that we have only a nodding familiarity with we would be having some very different concerns and probably have a pandemic that goes full bore until burnout with no vaccine available until such time as we learn how to make one.

Especially industrial husbandry is an invitation for diseases to spread and maybe manage to jump to humans. In severe cases, mass culling is the only way to stop epidemics among farmed animals. Which affects the price of animal products. Unless our governments subsidize that away...

Do you have any sources for diseases spreading from industrial husbandry which led to epidemic problems? This speculation is repeated over and over again, but is it really true or just speculation?

African swine fewer is a pretty serious pandemic that is still ongoing. The first outbreak was reported in the beginning of the 20th century when pig farming started to reach truly industrial dimensions. It can be spread by ticks, direct or indirect bodily contact, or contact with bodily fluids and pork products, and is quite difficult to contain. Also, it is endemic in wild boar populations and slowly progressing across the old world.

Fortunately for us, it does not cause diseases in humans (yet). But it causes huge economic damages and is devastating for wild boar populations.

In general, many diseases are not specific to humans, but also affect animals, or are transmitted by them.

I know mad cow disease came from farm raised cattle in the UK. People ate the beef and got mad cow disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

There are many cases of diseases jumping from animals too humans, I know of Mad Cow Disease.

But it was not an epidemic problem IIRC.

I didn't get Swine Flu in 2009 from a pig.

Salmanella, E.Coli, Avian Flu, Swine Flu...

Are these epidemic problems?

If we're now a fertile ground for pandemics, it really does ask for a response in kind: changing another parameter in the differential equations. And that could come in shortening the response time.

BioNTech had the vaccine weeks after they began studying the virus. Herd immunity is only being approached a full year later. Vaccine approval procedures and production logistics really do have a hugely wide margin of improvement.

It took two days to make moderna. If it hadn't because because of the rules about medicine we could started the US roll out _before_ the first case.

If there ever is a serious pandemic with high numbers like MERS we will.