I’m saying you should consider funding more basic research like mRNA vaccines and less bednets. Or setting up medical cruise ships for challenge trials in international waters. Or focusing on epistemics or even policy.
Also, if the pandemic wasn’t obviously net bad that raises a lot of questions...
- Is there any reason to think research that could lead to malaria vaccines is funding-constrained? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of in-mice studies, and in light of Eroom’s Law the returns on marginal biomedical research investment seem low. - Malaria is preventable and curable with existing drugs, so vaccines for it only make sense if their cost (including required research) works out lower than preventing it in other ways, which means some strategies that made sense for something like Covid won’t make sense here. - That’s not how international waters works, you’re still subject to the jurisdiction of the flag country and if they’re okay with your trial you could do it more cheaply on land there. - If you attempt an end-run of the developed-country regulators with your trial they will just refuse to approve anything based on your trial data, which is why pharma companies don’t jurisdiction-shop much at present. - That said developed country regulators do in fact approve challenge trials for malaria vaccines (as I noted) and vaccines for other curable diseases. Regulatory & IRB frameworks no doubt still add a bunch of overhead but this does further bound the potential benefits of attempting to work outside them. - I don’t know what “focusing on epistemics” could possibly entail in terms of concrete interventions. Trying to develop prediction markets I suppose? I have updated away from the usefulness of those based on their performances over the past past year though, and it seems like they are more constrained by policy than by lack of marginal funding (at retail donor levels). - Policy change is still intractable. - In general there are lots of margins on which the world might be improved, but the vast majority of them are not plausibly bottlenecked on resources that I or most EAs I know personally control. Learning about a few more such margins is not a significant update. I focus on bednets not because I think it’s unusually much more important than other world-improving margins, nor because I think it will be a margin where unusually much improvement happens in coming years, but because it’s a rare case of a margin where I think decisions I can make personally (about what to do with my disposable income dollars) are likely to have a nontrivial impact.
I’m saying you should consider funding more basic research like mRNA vaccines and less bednets. Or setting up medical cruise ships for challenge trials in international waters. Or focusing on epistemics or even policy.
Also, if the pandemic wasn’t obviously net bad that raises a lot of questions...
- Is there any reason to think research that could lead to malaria vaccines is funding-constrained? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of in-mice studies, and in light of Eroom’s Law the returns on marginal biomedical research investment seem low.
- Malaria is preventable and curable with existing drugs, so vaccines for it only make sense if their cost (including required research) works out lower than preventing it in other ways, which means some strategies that made sense for something like Covid won’t make sense here.
- That’s not how international waters works, you’re still subject to the jurisdiction of the flag country and if they’re okay with your trial you could do it more cheaply on land there.
- If you attempt an end-run of the developed-country regulators with your trial they will just refuse to approve anything based on your trial data, which is why pharma companies don’t jurisdiction-shop much at present.
- That said developed country regulators do in fact approve challenge trials for malaria vaccines (as I noted) and vaccines for other curable diseases. Regulatory & IRB frameworks no doubt still add a bunch of overhead but this does further bound the potential benefits of attempting to work outside them.
- I don’t know what “focusing on epistemics” could possibly entail in terms of concrete interventions. Trying to develop prediction markets I suppose? I have updated away from the usefulness of those based on their performances over the past past year though, and it seems like they are more constrained by policy than by lack of marginal funding (at retail donor levels).
- Policy change is still intractable.
- In general there are lots of margins on which the world might be improved, but the vast majority of them are not plausibly bottlenecked on resources that I or most EAs I know personally control. Learning about a few more such margins is not a significant update. I focus on bednets not because I think it’s unusually much more important than other world-improving margins, nor because I think it will be a margin where unusually much improvement happens in coming years, but because it’s a rare case of a margin where I think decisions I can make personally (about what to do with my disposable income dollars) are likely to have a nontrivial impact.