The cynic in me wants to agree with you, but the pollyanna optimist in me wants to think that such thematic investing isn't necessarily a bad thing. I say this

The cynic in me wants to agree with you, but the pollyanna optimist in me wants to think that such thematic investing isn't necessarily a bad thing. I say this because I worked in academic bioinformatics research in 2002-2004. After the anthrax scares in 2001 a bunch of grant money was available under the auspices of "bioterrorism research." My PIs simply redid their grant proposals to change their general science research to bioterrorism research. Some interesting tech that is generally applicable came out of said research: biosensor chips, mapping, basic statistical clustering research, anonymization and medical record database research, etc. Thus in theory the $200M could be used to fund important projects under the guise of "pandemic prevention" that could be generally useful. A few things that come to mind are gene sequencing speedups and advancements in molecular engineering (of vaccines). I'm not saying this is really how things would pan out but it's perhaps the optimistic scenario. After all, the funding for the internet came around because the USA was panicked about the Soviets becoming technologically superior - ARPA arose because the Russians launched Sputnik.