Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Good point. That will take a while. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve never developed an effective vaccine for any other coronavirus. Now, I do think, from what I read and hear, it is possible to do it now, but it is not a trivial procedure. It is doing something for the first time. It’s doing it in an environment that is highly regulated and bureaucratized, where institutions are slow to respond. Simple issues like scaling up ventilator production and distribution, we are still far behind the curve, even though we are really quite sure that is an urgent matter. Even if you’re relatively optimistic about this crisis, we are to this day performing poorly on that matter. Will we get the vaccine right? There’s a lot of optimism out there, but I don’t think it’s a likely scenario that simply four or five months from now everyone is getting the vaccine and in essence the problem is vanishing. That seems quite unlikely from what I read in here. It’s maybe more like 12 to 18 months. If we’re extremely lucky, it could be a bit less than that. Then in terms of treatments that work, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty. Many treatments are being tried right now. There’s a lot of experimentation. Hard for me as a non-biomedicine person to judge. We’ll just have to see. But again, there’s still liability issues. There are scaling issues. There’s distribution issues, possibility of secondary harms. Given that most people are not killed or even harmed by coronavirus, it’s very complicated. Fair enough. We’ll see, I guess. I spent most of my life as an optimist. Most of that optimism ended or I think around… It’s slowly starting to decline through the 2000s as events… maybe more, and I got older. I think when you get older, you get crankier.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.