Most EA effort on pandemic preparedness seems to be focused on pathogen agnostic approaches such as meta-genomic sequencing or PPE stockpiling. Defenses in Depth explicitly advocates against approaches that require categorizing known pathogen types and defending against those specifically. My question is why are we so sure that future pandemics will not belong to known pathogen types. This Metaculus question has only a 6% chance that a pathogen in an unknown family will cause the next pandemic. My understanding is that this would indicate more of a focus on the kinds of interventions that would be effective against known pathogens like a universal flu or coronavirus vaccine instead of putting all of our chips into other pathogen agnostic interventions.
The two reasons I can think of why most EA effort goe toward pathogen agnostic approaches are first EAs tend to view extinction level pandemics as hundreds of thousands of times worse than "ordinary" pandemics and second they believe that catastrophic pandemics are more neglected so the marginal dollar or talent goes further here than toward a universal coronavirus vaccine for example. Is this an accurate characterization or am I wrong about the tractability of pathogen specific approaches?
