Twenty years of SARS

The European Union (EU) has spent billions of euros fighting the Covid crisis, but only a few million trying to prevent it, failing precisely because of a lack of funding for research. Far more lives and economic losses could have been saved if decision-makers in Brussels had stuck to the investment strategy for drug development introduced after the first SARS outbreak in 2003. In the period between the two outbreaks, not only in Europe but around the world, public coffers had invested taxpayers' money in several SARS research projects, including both drugs and vaccines, which ultimately never came to public fruition due to funding cuts. When the pandemic began and public funding became available again, some of these promising projects were resumed and their inhibitors proved to be somewhat effective against Covid, showing that sustained research efforts could have made a difference. Two decades after the first SARS, such a short-sighted, emergency-based approach still seems to prevail, potentially leaving European citizens vulnerable to future threats.