The roadmap for defeating covid-19 (WAPO)

We need a government-run effort that brings together industry and academia to foster medical breakthroughs

M. Susan Lindee

Although it cannot be bombed or cyberattacked, the covid-19 crisis has been likened to World War III. While some have criticized the comparison to war, in one key way, it may suggest a model for defeating the virus now upending our lives and threatening national security. During World War II, the nation’s scientific and medical expertise was mobilized to fight the war. On an emergency basis, we need to repeat that mobilization, and build collaborative industry-academic-government networks to address covid-19 and its consequences for public health and clinical care. A new, well-funded Office of Scientific Research and Development, striving to stop covid-19 as its central goal, might be the most important military and health priority of our time.

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If you are reading this today, there is a fairly good chance that you have benefited from antibiotics more than once. And antibiotics began as a defense technology.

The successful mobilization of science between 1939 and 1945 played a critical role in the emergence of the United States as the dominant military power in the world. The United States has also been a scientific and technological powerhouse, leading the world in Nobel Prizes over the past 70 years (375 winners as of 2019, vs. 129 for the runner-up, the U.K.). This confluence of both scientific and military dominance is not a coincidence.

Nonetheless, we’ve lost some of the collaborative spirit that animated the achievements of the World War II era, outsourcing much of our innovation to private companies like those that dominate Silicon Valley. But that model is far less likely to overcome the enemy we face today as quickly as a resurrection of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Its model of coordinating development among government agencies, nonprofits and for-profit corporations, each of which brings something to the table in this fight, is exactly what we need to find a solution to covid-19 as rapidly as possible.

We need to support scientists and fund all kinds of relevant research in virology and other fields, immediately, on an emergency basis. Leaders at the federal and state levels need to recognize that hospitals and health care in general are part of national defense — and in a country with the largest defense budget in the world, we should spare no expense on health-care systems and science.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/01/roadmap-defeating-covid-19/