评论 | 诺奖得主：新冠肺炎疫情不会是近一百年内最后一次疫情

I'm Peter Doherty. I'm a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and I worked for decades on viruses and immunity. My colleague Rolf Zinkernagel and I were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996 for our work on cellular immunity, which has been my specific interest since then.

我是彼得·多哈提，澳大利亚墨尔本大学教授。我从事病毒和免疫研究已经有几十年了。我和我的同事罗夫·辛克纳吉1996年凭借我们对细胞免疫的研究获得了诺贝尔奖，从那以后这一直是我的研究领域。

COVID-19 is an international catastrophe in many ways. It's causing enormous societal damage and enormous economic damage, more so in some countries than others. But I think we need to understand this is a coronavirus. Before the year 2000, there were two coronaviruses circulating in human populations. We've known about them for a long time, they're in the group of viruses that cause seasonal respiratory infections: Common colds, croup in little kids, and so forth. Now, there are hundreds of viruses like that, but there were two coronaviruses in that mix.

新冠肺炎疫情是一场国际灾难，在许多方面都是如此。疫情造成了巨大的社会和经济损失，一些国家所受的影响尤为严重。但我认为，我们必须明白，这是一种冠状病毒。2000年之前，在人类中传播的冠状病毒有两种。我们很久以前就对这类病毒有所了解，它们能够引起季节性呼吸道感染，比如普通感冒、儿童哮吼等等。目前有数百种病毒能引起这类病症，但其中冠状病毒只有两种。

Now, since the year 2000, we have had five coronaviruses cross over probably from bats, maybe through intermediate species into human beings. You experienced the first SARS virus in China. We didn't get that. It didn't get as far as Australia, but it was distributed in East Asia and it got to Toronto. And then we have the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus, started in the Middle East. Probably someone got infected, a bat infected a dromedary camel, and maybe someone who raises camels, kissed the camel – they do kiss their camels ­– and contracted it. And we have a disease which is still spreading, highly lethal: The MERS virus we came across in 2013 I think it was, and it kills about 30% of people it infects. But fortunately, it is not as infectious as SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus. 

2000年至今，又出现了另外五种冠状病毒。它们或是由蝙蝠传播给人类，或是通过中间物种传播给人类。非典病毒首次影响中国的时候，我们没受影响，它没有传播到澳大利亚这么远，但却曾在东亚地区蔓延，并且传到了多伦多。之后又出现了中东呼吸综合征病毒，始于中东地区。可能先是蝙蝠感染了单峰驼，然后某个饲养骆驼的人亲吻了这匹骆驼，他们确实会亲吻自己的骆驼，然后感染了。直到今天，由这种病毒引起的高致命性疾病仍未停止传播。2013年出现的中东呼吸综合征病毒致死率大概是30%。但幸运的是，它的传染性低于SARS-CoV-2，也就是新冠病毒。

So there are those two viruses that have remained in the sort of Europe, Asia thing, except for the original SARS getting to Toronto, and that original virus has burned out. But the other four viruses are still circulating. And among those viruses, apart from COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, there are two common cold viruses came across in 2004, one in the Netherlands, one in Hong Kong, and they are now globally infecting human beings. 

这两种病毒基本上一直存在于欧洲和亚洲地区，除了非典病毒传到了多伦多以外，但这种病毒已经消失。而其他四种病毒仍在传播。其中除了新冠病毒以外，2004年还出现了两种普通感冒病毒，分别出现在荷兰和香港，目前已经在全球人口中传播。

So what is this telling us? What it's telling us is that with the change in economic circumstances, particularly in Asia; with the massive ramp up of international air travel, but very large numbers of people, we are at major risk of further pandemics. And we need to use COVID-19 and this experience as a learning exercise. And we need to study it very, very carefully and get global agreements on things that need to be done. One of them would of course be stopping the planes very early on. We didn't do that because the whole of the viral immunity community was thinking in terms of the influenza mantra. And that mantra, I've been involved in influenza research for years, is that you cannot stop a respiratory pathogen like flu by stopping the planes.

所以这告诉了我们什么呢？这告诉我们，随着经济情况，特别是亚洲地区经济情况发生改变；随着涉及巨大数量人口的国际旅行大幅增加，我们面临着受到其他国际大流行病侵袭的重大风险。我们需要把抗击新冠肺炎疫情的经历作为一个学习过程，需要非常非常认真地对其加以研究并就需要采取的行动达成全球共识。其中一项措施当然是要尽早停止航班。我们没有这样做是因为整个病毒免疫界的思路都受到了应对流感的方法的影响。我从事流感研究很多年了，有一个说法就是，停止航班是无法阻止流感病毒这种呼吸道病原体传播的。 

But you can. We've stopped COVID-19 in Australia and New Zealand. We're island states, so we're better able to do that. But we stopped the planes. So that's one of the things we need to think about. The other thing we need to think about is that vaccines and monoclonal antibodies and all these wonderful things that we develop with our technology, takes us about a year to do that. Not to make the product, we can make that very, very fast. But to test it, to make sure that it's safe. And that's why it's taken so long to get the vaccines out. But what we could have done is develop anti-viral drugs, because we've got anti-viral drugs that hit all influenza viruses. We've got anti-viral drugs that hit all the AIDS-type retroviruses. We should have been making antiviral drugs that hit all the coronaviruses and the couple of other types of viruses that are out there in bats particularly, they could cross over into us. I think there are things we should do. We should not think this is going to be the last pandemic for 100 years. We're going to be confronting these issues much more regularly if we go back to our practices before this happened.

但其实是可以的。澳大利亚和新西兰都成功控制了疫情。因为都是岛国，所以我们有一定的优势。但我们也停止了航班。所以这是我们需要思考的一个方面。另一方面就是疫苗和单克隆抗体还有其他依靠科技研发出来的优秀成果，我们花了大约一年时间就做到了。这并不是指最后的成品，而是说我们可以非常非常快地完成研究。但我们还需要进行测试，确保其安全性。这也是为何推出疫苗如此耗时的原因。但我们本可以完成的是开发抗病毒药物。因为我们已经有了能够应对所有流感病毒的药物，有了能够应对所有艾滋病毒类逆转录病毒的药物。我们应该坚持抗病毒药物的研发，确保能够应对所有冠状病毒和现存的其他类型病毒，特别是蝙蝠种群中的病毒，因为它们可能跨物种传播给人类。我认为我们有很多应该做的事，我们不应该认为这次疫情过后的一个世纪都不会再有疫情。如果我们还继续此前的做法，那就会越来越多地遇到这些问题。 

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