Not sure why people are downvoting you. It's clearly the case that there are lots of problems you can solve that create value and make/save people money, yet don't result in you capturing any of that money for yourself. For-profit companies mostly ignore those kinds of problems by definition.
It's very hard to incorporate events like this into a financial model. With chronic disease like diabetes or cancer they can get a pretty good forecast of demand, so it's translates into a clearer understanding of ROI with higher confidence: more they invest the more they get plus some error, but even the error won't offset the forecast by much. With epidemics, not only you need to predict when, but also what kind of virus it's gonna be. The reward is great, but so is the risk. Would you invest $100 to almost surely get back ($130 +/- $5), or $1000 with a potential outcome of $10000, but very low confidence that it is going to happen at all before you run out of money.
Similar to financial crisis, if the next one could be predicted, it wouldn't happen.
SARS vaccine was abandoned after the epidemic died out because the funding was cut. Pharma is being perfectly rational knowing that in 6 months all of the funding may be cut.
What's not rational is cutting funding to supposedly disappeared diseases. They do re-occurr. The Spanish Flu died out at first, only to re-emerge in WW1 trenches and wreck absolute destruction.
> What's not rational is cutting funding to supposedly disappeared diseases. They do re-occurr. The Spanish Flu died out at first, only to re-emerge in WW1 trenches and wreck absolute destruction.
Wouldn't the fact that the disease has disappeared in human populations greatly increase the required funding and limit the effectiveness of the research? The best you could do would be to produce a bandwidth of candidate drugs that can't advance to human trials for ethical reasons.
