A Quantitative Approach to Vaccine Funding

Jacob Trefethen · 29 May 2025 · blog.jacobtrefethen.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Jacob Trefethen did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
R&D spending varies more than tenfold across diseases for no good reason, which is where the best opportunities in science funding are.

Their wordsOur punchline is that R&D spending varies by 10X+ across diseases for no good reason. I've been poking at that punchline for the last six or so years, from different directions, and I am confident it's true.

Interesting
Our reading
Infectious diseases get far less industry R&D per death than non-communicable ones, because they mostly kill people in countries where a cure pays less.

Their wordsInfectious diseases as a category receive vastly less R&D spending from industry than non-communicable diseases, per death they cause, because they disproportionately kill people in lower- and middle-income countries where the payoff for making a cure is less lucrative.

Interesting