> Are they just supposed to fund everyone indefinitely so they can never be accused of missing something good?
No, of course not - that is just an unhelpful false-dichotomy straw man reply (like the whole of wuwuno's).
The issue of funding both fundamental research and that which lacks a pathway to short-term profitability is a difficult one, much more subtle than you presented in your original post, where getting VC funding was presented as the sole criterion that mattered (the point of view given in that post amounted to saying that delegating all decisions to VCs was the proper way to go about it.)
One of the reasons vaccine reasearch hasn't been attracting a lot of VC funding is that vaccines are not nearly the money-makers that drugs and tests are. We're lucky that some research was kept going despite this, and the lesson from that is that we should not trust in VC funding being the predominant determinant of funding.
No, of course not - that is just an unhelpful false-dichotomy straw man reply (like the whole of wuwuno's).
The issue of funding both fundamental research and that which lacks a pathway to short-term profitability is a difficult one, much more subtle than you presented in your original post, where getting VC funding was presented as the sole criterion that mattered (the point of view given in that post amounted to saying that delegating all decisions to VCs was the proper way to go about it.)
One of the reasons vaccine reasearch hasn't been attracting a lot of VC funding is that vaccines are not nearly the money-makers that drugs and tests are. We're lucky that some research was kept going despite this, and the lesson from that is that we should not trust in VC funding being the predominant determinant of funding.