For infectious disease management and control, vaccines are considered golden countermeasures 
but are not the most adequate tool for mitigating 
the early effects of an outbreak.

Taking the recent COVID-19 pandemic as an example, access to broadly applicable therapeutic antivirals would have had a major impact, decreasing the human toll of the disease, and alleviating the burden carried by health care systems. It is urgent to focus resources and efforts on the development of broad spectrum antiviral drugs against unknown pathogens.