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So we all agree on the theory. The rest is practicalities. Even so, there is ample room for skepticism.

Which drugs should we either produce for ourselves or be capable of producing on short notice? The WHO publishes a list of 400 essential medicines, with another list for children. Should we onshore our national needs for all 400? How about the inputs to these 400? Input-output analysis has fallen out of favour in economics but anyone who ever did work in the area understands how quickly a detailed grid of inputs and outputs becomes indecipherably complex. If you don’t believe that, read Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” (not “iPencil”) to see how complicated producing even such a simple thing as a pencil is. If we need to make the ingredients for the ingredients — as true self-sufficiency requires — how many new production processes will we be running?

To this list of 400 we presumably want to add the COVID-19 vaccine, when it becomes available, and any new drugs that prove effective in treating the virus, assuming we can get patent-holders to co-operate. But it’s not enough to prepare for the past war. We’ll also want to anticipate future pandemics and develop drugs to fight these new threats. But how much sense does it make to spend against what may be a 100-year flood? Equipment set aside in 1921 after the Spanish flu would be of no use now. And could preparation be self-fulfilling? The current pandemic probably wasn’t caused by a laboratory accident. But it could have been. The more forward-looking our research the greater the chance of mishap.