The rationale for "virus hunting" is to create advance vaccines. However, you cannot safely test a vaccine for a novel, deadly pathogen on healthy humans. This makes the knowledge unactionable for prevention, while creating immense risk by bringing dangerous pathogens into leaky labs and publicizing their existence.

Unlike military radar for missiles, the world has no passive, global alert system for emerging pathogens. We currently rely on a slow, reactive process where sick patients present symptoms at hospitals, significantly delaying detection and response, as was the case with COVID-19.

When a vaccine successfully eliminates dominant bacterial strains (serotypes), it creates a niche for non-covered strains to emerge and cause disease. This phenomenon, "serotype replacement," means narrowly focused vaccines can become victims of their own success by shifting the landscape of infectious threats.

The typical path for a new, high-risk biology is to test it in patients with no other options, like in oncology. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive deviation from this norm. For the first time, a completely new class of medicine (mRNA) was deployed at scale in healthy individuals, not the sickest.

Investors are hesitant to fund antimicrobial resistance research because the field has been stuck for decades trying the same approaches—traditional antibiotics and vaccines—and expecting different results. A fundamental shift in scientific strategy is required to regain investor confidence and make progress against superbugs.

The FDA is shifting policy to no longer allow reliance on immunogenicity data (immunobridging) for approving new or updated vaccines. This move toward requiring full clinical efficacy trials will make it harder to combat evolving pathogens and would have prevented past approvals of key vaccines like those for HPV and Ebola.

The key public health failure during the pandemic was not initial uncertainty, but the systemic inability to execute rapid experiments. Basic, knowable questions about transmission, masks, and safe distances went unanswered because of a failure to generate data through randomized trials.

The next major biological threat may not be a single event like COVID-19, but rather 'waves and waves of new pandemics.' This is due to the increasing accessibility and decreasing cost of the knowledge and equipment needed to create novel pathogens, potentially allowing individuals to tinker with viruses in their basements, leading to frequent lab leaks.

Diseases like Ebola and malaria, which primarily affect poor countries, lack market incentives for vaccine R&D. The Ebola vaccine only progressed because it was briefly on a U.S. bioterrorism list created after 9/11, highlighting how market failures require creative, sometimes accidental, incentives to overcome.