A good op-ed was in the NY Times a couple days ago: Recipe for Destruction.
The article doesn’t address this point specifically, but i think a manhattan-project like thing that this article recommends is the only way that we’re ever going to get a cure for the common cold.
In the existing System, there’s just no economic motivation for a cold or flu cure-all–the existing medicine industry is too entrenched in providing maskers-of-symptoms, cures for specialized diseases, etc, that they’d never want to give up a revenue source for something like a panacaea.