Everyone wants to 'follow the science'. But we can't waste time on blame
In 1981, a virus that had jumped the species barrier some decades earlier to infect humans began to wreak havoc among the gay community in San Francisco and New York. A taskforce was set up to study the cause of this disease, and it took a few years to identify HIV as the definitive cause of Aids and its genome to be sequenced, and nearly 15 years before a cocktail of drugs meant that having an HIV infection was no longer a certain death sentence.
Forty years later, the cause of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan was identified as a new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, and its sequence determined in a matter of weeks. That, in turn, paved the way for a sensitive test for infection and, now, antibody tests for people who may have had the disease. That we know so much in such record time is due to sustained international investment in science.
However, there is much that we don’t know. We do not know why this virus is so much more transmissible than some others. Whether being infected will make us immune and, if so, for how long. Why it sometimes sets off a severe inflammatory reaction that can lead to death, and why some individuals are more vulnerable to it than others.
Science is also helping to drive the unprecedented worldwide search for a vaccine, but it is the stark reality that, even after 40 years, there is no vaccine for Aids or many other viral diseases. So it is important to put strong efforts into new and repurposed drugs to combat infection.
Such uncertainty is intrinsic to science. Normally, a gradual accumulation of evidence and scrutiny by the