What counts as selfish? If someone is developing a drug for it but can't make the money back they spent on it because they don't have patent protection, they're

What counts as selfish? If someone is developing a drug for it but can't make the money back they spent on it because they don't have patent protection, they're not going to do it in the first place. A startup will fundamentally need to have profitability to be worth developing the drug. The government is a different story, and of course there's a chance the vaccines come out of the NIH etc. But if it comes out of a startup in particular, the people behind it we're only driven to create it for profit (why are they founding a startup instead of working through academia, or doing it as a startup/funding a startup instead of as a nonprofit?) And if that profit motive was required to make this work, then profit was the tool used to fight Covid, not the other way around, no?