This, to me, is an interesting thing to think about. With enough effort and sacrifice, we could eliminate influenza or other communicable diseases globally. How much economic, social, and educational disaster is worth ridding humanity of influenza?

SARS-CoV-2 has been horrific, and we've lost millions of lives to it already. Assuming we can eliminate it and influenza along with it, would there eventually be a "net saving" of lives?

edit: this is behind a paywall.. not sure of hn's policy on that.