Old-Dutch Out of context that quote sounds bad. If you read the entire paper, it makes perfect sense. Basically the public won’t support research funding unless there’s an imminent threat and without long term r&d around vaccines (they cite missed opportunities with SARS and MERS), we can’t scale vaccine development quickly enough when a rapid threat develops.
This quote sums up the argument pretty well:
A key limitation was the disappearance of the threat, which resulted in the lack of will to pursue this vaccine development program further. Another limitation was that traditional vaccine technologies are not amenable to rapid response, stressing the need for platform technologies. Arguably, she concluded, a decade of coronavirus vaccine development has been lost, and said it is time to ask the hard questions about what the cost of that inaction could be, before the consequences are seen.
