I'm glad this is being done. Government funded research like this is just another financial engineering opportunity for these research companies/universities. I am not making this up, just check the other post about scientific fraud at scale which is currently on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796526

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insane_dreamer 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

All we're doing is shifting your tax dollars to the military, which is another financial engineering opportunities for defense contractors.

If my money's going to go somewhere I'd rather it go to research universities/companies and get outputs that will save lives rather than destroy lives.

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bigyabai 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud. If anything, we trust the government with these incalculably valuable public-works projects because we cannot afford to write off the alternative. Not for COVID, not for the seasonal flu, and not for the next plague/ebola/malaria of your lifetime either.

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rngecounty 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud.

Right it won't. My point however is that don't create an avenue, private or public, which has dedicated funds for such activities. It just ends up becoming an industry which tries to gain off those funds than doing any real research.

	▲	bigyabai 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's how all industry works. The side that invests most in innovative techniques is rewarded with larger margins and incentivized to wring out every last dollar they can. The "if we don't look at the research then it doesn't exist" mentality is why TSMC is 5 generations ahead of Intel's fabs.
	▲	haganomy 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you know how the Internet was created?