The advantage of short-term funding is what you've seen so far, money given right away to test new drugs and start the vaccine development process. That was very important and was done. What is useful in long-term funding is what you do next. For example, we need to know the durability. We need to be able to prepare for a new pandemic. How do we monitor the viral illnesses, the zoonosis that comes from animals to humans over time? There was a push for research during SARS-CoV and then afterwards nothing more. The research was left in the middle of the development for a vaccine. That was never completed because it was not popular anymore then and it was not à la mode.
You need both. You need infrastructure that will allow us to be prepared for any kind of viral illness that can come and that will be useful for all researchers, and you also need to have specific, multidisciplinary research programs that can lead to collaboration and eventually to innovation.
Just to be correct, there hasn't been a billion dollars put into research for this pandemic. It's the $150 million. Just to fund one clinical trial is $5 million. To give you an idea of how little you can fund for $150 million, if you have 10 clinical trials for vaccines, then a third of your money is gone and you haven't started looking at infection prevention, more basic immunity or other stuff. Unfortunately, you don't go far with $150 million.