> all that mattered was finding a solution as quickly as possible
What's to stop someone spending a bunch of money on a dead-end project that benefits them and no-one else, and then saying "hey, it's risky, bummer we couldn't make a vaccine"?
We can be generous to make sure it gets done by someone, but we should also make sure that people actually try.
The current UK government has a lot of stories about procurement, and it gives the impression that they mainly benefitted their friends, with the procurement of PPE and vaccines being a nice side-effect.
In the context of shutting down significant percentages of economies for months, in the context of the government (in the UK) providing furlough schemes where they pay peoples salaries, in the context of essentially banning most social interaction and the population slowly going a bit mad, what the hell does it matter if we fund some dud vaccines? What does it even matter if some are outright corrupt and do nothing?
It's the worst kind of bike shedding, it's "well we can't do much about the most life changing event since WW2 but we sure can argue about the transparency of contracts!"
What stops it is 1) Not awarding money to people who might be able to do it, only to those who can demonstrate that they can do it 2) Caveating the bulk of the payment to the successful production.
In most cases, the money was for a pre-order of vaccines afaik and if they don't produce, they don't get paid.
What's to stop someone spending a bunch of money on a dead-end project that benefits them and no-one else, and then saying "hey, it's risky, bummer we couldn't make a vaccine"?
We can be generous to make sure it gets done by someone, but we should also make sure that people actually try.
The current UK government has a lot of stories about procurement, and it gives the impression that they mainly benefitted their friends, with the procurement of PPE and vaccines being a nice side-effect.