>>11905115SARS and MERS have been on the WHO list of priority diseases for research and development as the potential source of future pandemics and epidemics.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins University ran a simulated coronavirus pandemic with a similar death rate to COVID-19 that tested the response of NGOs and governments to a pandemic of this magnitude.
The film Contagion depicts a pandemic caused by a zoonotic virus from a bat.
Scientists have been predicting something like this for years. After SARS there were many attempts to develop anti-viral drugs and vaccines, but the funding dried up when the epidemic died down. Pharmaceuticals don't stand to profit from the creation of treatments to rare diseases which may one day become large epidemics because there are no patients to sell the treatment to. There are plenty of scientists who have identified the vital importance of researching various pathogens we don't have effective treatments for, but which won't make pharmaceuticals lots of money; the problem is capitalism, not science.
