The good people at Bioanalysis Zone let me write some of my opinions up and edit them for a more mainstream audience than this weird blog normally appeals to. In this installation, I talk about just a few of the shining successes MS labs that were able to get access to SARS-CoV-2 samples have had. I also whine about why there were so relatively few of them.
I guess I tried to make an argument that based on the ratio of (access to sample : valuable contributions) that if we had more access there would clearly be more contributions. Not sure if it carried across the way I meant, or not. I mean...if you clearly know what you're doing (not talking about me, obviously, but other people)...and you want to help, you shouldn't have to go to Craigslist or LinkedIN to find disease samples during a freaking pandemic, right? That's what legitimate people in legitimate roles have had to do.
Imagine if we'd had an established front line of defense network of labs (featuring mass spectrometry) that had the job of responding to emerging pathogens, providing testing until the next gen technologies could be scaled up and providing drug activity data from day 1..... How different would it be today?