I always keep in mind, that there are huge profits to be made, by any corporation claiming to have a vaccine or a drug to treat any number of ailments. All the huge corporations of the world are all connected, and any 'disaster' in one sector is money to be made in another, and since like royalty, they are all linked it is totally correct to question if some medical threat to humanity is truly a opportunity for a corporation to make money. In fact, there is a big dispute going on right now, over who actually OWNS this novel corona virus or MERS as they call it. The dispute over ownership caused delays in diagnostics. I am not sure if it has even been resolved. Frankly, if a brave doc from Egypt had not sent the virus to the Netherlands, we would still not know of nCoV. He was working in Saudi, at the time, and they are very angry with him. He is back in Egypt now. I am sure Saudi didn't want news of this virus getting out and secondly they wanted to secure 'intellectual rights' to the virus, and a cut of any money made from tests developed, vaccine developed and drugs developed to treat it. That's a lot of money.
Privatization of this process is a problem in terms of public safety, but governments don't really have the ability to do this kind of research either. The World Health Organization is a GOOD organization, as is the CDC, but they only have so much staff and they only have access to what any given government gives them access to. Saudi Arabia isn't even a member of the World Health Organization, at all. I wonder if some of the countries that are, really can be relied upon to give full disclosure to the WHO. For example, North Korea is a member. Many countries have suppressed bloggers who try to give out information, and some have thrown them in prison.
But, YES, I do consider who profits from what, when news like this is released.
Some Chinese guy was angry enough to kill a public health official, and I would bet the farm it was some small scale poultry farmer or some one who lives off the land, and he probably was put out of business by the huge bird cull in China, and the move to large scale CAFO type production in China. The answer for China may be as simple as nice butcher shops, where small farmers can bring their birds for sanitary processing. Some provinces re-opened their wet markets, I suspect due to the fact that they are part of Chinese culture. The losses to the poultry market in China and even worldwide from H7N9 was pretty bad. Possibly overblown. It looks to me, from what I could gather, that the main reason that H7N9 was spreading was those plucking machines that cause aerosolization of body fluids. The damp climate of the wet market allowed this aerosol to get deep into people's lungs. Any place you bring a lot of animals together, even such as the county and state fairs are an opportunity for germs to exchange. Add butchering, and ick. Big mess. But now H7N9 is out there. It's in wild birds. It's in a small percent of domestic birds. It's in some people, not a lot, but each time, it gets a new chance to reshuffle the DNA deck and recombine in a way that could make it more transmissible.
It's interesting that China just bought Smithfield, America's largest producer of pork. If you remember, 16,000 pigs were found floating in a river near Shanghai just before H7N9 broke out.
It's good to question, not only the government, but also private entities who stand to profit, before we blindly jump on any bandwagon.
