The Atlantic: Is It Possible to Predict the Next Pandemic?
“…Sick of being perpetually caught off guard, some scientists want to fully catalogue all viral threats, and predict which are likely to cause tomorrow’s outbreaks. The PREDICT project has been doing that for eight years; with $100 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, they’ve discovered nearly 1,000 new viruses. The Global Virome Project is even more ambitious. Proposed in 2016, and still existing in concept only, it aims to find and sequence almost all the viruses in birds and mammals that could potentially spill over into humans. … There’s just one problem, say Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, two virologists based on Sydney. It won’t work…” (Yong, 10/25).