well T1D is a lot harder nut to crack than a virus. If they find that cure in 5 years I’ll eat my hat of course, but it’s not so much that I have a ton of “faith” in the scientific process as much as I can just see that we have made a lot more progress in general on antiviral treatments and I think this is a fundamentally easier problem than solving T1D. I guess I don’t have faith in the scientific process, it’s more the math. If you have millions of people to enroll in trials over a short period of time (which the world unfortunately will), we will have results very quickly. Most trials drag on because they struggle to recruit patients, or because seeing the outcome will take years or months. We have a real shot at finding effective treatments for this disease in weeks assuming we don’t make it difficult to recruit people for trials – which can happen if lots of drugs are being prescribed, willy-nilly, off label, and not tracked. Imagine you’d need 300 newly-diagnosed T1Ds to see if a honeymoon treatment is effective – we need to wait a MINIMUM of two years just to recruit patients because only 40,000 people in this country are diagnosed each year. For those with long-standing T1D, we have more options, but also the treatments are currently risky enough and invasive enough that finding a person who’s managing just fine with their diabetes who is willing to try an experimental treatment that could have severe effects, well, that’s more challenging. Compare that to this virus; if say 20% are hospitalized, and we can see within three weeks if our interventions reduce time to hospitalization, the fraction of people who go on to require a ventilator or ICU bed, or die, and hundreds of thousands of people will be sickened just in the next week in our country alone, AND we don’t have to work hard to find those patients --they’re all hospitalized and under doctor’s care and they are already facing a huge risk of incredibly invasive, Hail Mary type treatments like ventilators – well, quickly filling a trial and getting results is a lot easier and quicker. Also, we haven’t cured a single autoimmune disease as far as I know, at least not unless maybe someone gets their bone marrow wiped out or something. So to me, these are just different scientific problems and not really comparable.
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