6 ms·

How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed? The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among th

by creato 5y ago

How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed? The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 5y ago
I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.
thatguy0900 5y ago
At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- darkarmani 5y ago
  We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward? You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.
    - creato 5y ago
      > This was all financed with government money. Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).
burkaman 5y ago
Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago
  > If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives". COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense. What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions". [1] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk

by creato 5y ago

How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed? The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 5y ago

I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.

thatguy0900 5y ago

At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
darkarmani 5y ago
We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward? You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.
  - creato 5y ago
    > This was all financed with government money. Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).

burkaman 5y ago

Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.

JoshuaDavid 5y ago
> If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives". COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense. What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions". [1] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk