Is the virus also the result of a budgtary disease?

Sam Smith - Not discussed in the coronavirus crisis is whether coming up with a vaccine is solely a scientific matter - or is it a budgetary one as well? It will, by one estimate, cost $500 billion to put a man on Mars. What will it cost to keep millions of folks alive here on earth? 

The currently planned virus funding package, notes Politico, "would send $826 million to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to drive the development of coronavirus vaccines, treatments and tests." That's less than one percent of the proposed Mars program. 

As NBC reports, "Figuring out which vaccine strategies work and which don't — potentially could have been completed before the new outbreak, said Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health who studies vaccine development. He said the global response to the coronavirus exposes broader flaws in the way medical research is funded, which he says tends to be market-driven and reactive, rather than proactive.

"We have a pattern in our medical research landscape in which outbreaks lead to a surge in research investment, and if and when those outbreaks wane, as they invariably do, other priorities take their place," Schwartz said. "As a result, you lose those opportunities to capitalize on that initial investment, and the cycle starts over again."

And as Dr. KevinJ. Tracey wrote for CNN:

The funding allocates $2.2 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and $3.1 billion for the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund, but only $836 million for the National Institutes of Health. Although the investment in the CDC and the public health fund is essential and appropriate to contain the present crisis, this bill fails to make a dent in the 17 years of inadequate funding for the NIH that has come before this -- funding which has not even kept pace with inflation. ..... Because research does eradicate deadly diseases, like polio and smallpox, we have an obligation to support the science to treat and prevent diseases like Ebola or coronavirus.