We explore the science, scalability, and (of course) economics surrounding the global vaccine race. Guests include the chief medical officer of the first U.S. firm to go to Phase 3 trials with a vaccine candidate; a former F.D.A. commissioner who’s been warning of a pandemic for years; and an economist who thinks Covid-19 may finally change how diseases are cured.

Stock markets love to take everyone by surprise, and less than a year from now a very big surprise will have played out: Stocks will be a lot higher by June as the economy moves into overheat mode. How do we get from the current grim state of affairs to this very different world? Two steps.

As donations to nonprofits have decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic, those with endowments are turning to these funds to help them survive the crisis. But not all endowments are created equal. Factors such as size, management, and investment allocation significantly affect how much revenue endowments generate.

How much should it cost the average American to get a COVID-19 vaccine shot in the arm? Although a vaccine is months away, if not longer, billions of tax dollars are spent to rapidly research, develop, manufacture and distribute several candidates. The federal government promised to make a vaccine free for people of low income. How many taxpayer dollars would enable everyone to get it without paying?

THE STOCK MARKET appears strangely indifferent to Covid-19 these days, but that wasn’t true in March, as the scale and breadth of the crisis hit home. By one measure, it was the most volatile month in stock market history; on March 16, the Dow Jones average fell almost 13 percent, its biggest one-day decline since 1987. To some, the vertigo-inducing episode also exposed a weakness of quantitative (or quant) trading firms, which rely on mathematical models, including artificial intelligence, to make trading decisions.

“The parallels between video games and day trading is becoming closer and closer,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For many gamers, particularly the younger ones who are not used to trading and don't fully understand the impact of significant losses and gains on their psychophysiology, it could have some significant adverse consequences.”

One thing we’ve learned from the Covid-19 crisis is that there can be a conflict between resilience and optimisation. If, for example, the NHS had had lots of spare beds, ventilators and PPE equipment before the pandemic began it would have been more resilient and better able to cope with the crisis. But this would at the time have appeared sub-optimal, as these resources would have been wasted for months.

It seems that the closest to developing a vaccine for Covid-19 is the American Moderna, whose shares have risen this year by 178 percent. Returns on other companies' shares are even four-digit.

A recent graduate “upcycled” his gown into personal protective equipment for healthcare workers (and inspired others to do the same), researchers found an antibody from a 2003 SARS patient that could be effective against the new coronavirus, and a team of MIT economists crunched the historical numbers and came up with some encouraging results on vaccine development. Read on for more promising news in the fight against COVID-19.

More than 35,000 nonprofits have investment funds, with $800 billion in assets managed. The funds generate an average return – net of administrative expenses – of 5.3 percent, according to The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds, a research paper from Andrew W. Lo and Egor Matveyev of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Stefan Zeume of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.

Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.

“The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area,” says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.

Yet, little is known about which NPOs have endowment funds and how they invest. A new paper by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Andrew W. Lo and Visiting Prof. Egor Matveyev sheds light on the “black box of endowments,” revealing that bigger funds and NPOs with stricter governance generate higher returns.

In the past two months alone, Wall Street investors have injected billions into a handful of biotech companies in the early stages of producing vaccines or drugs to fight the new coronavirus . Some of these companies are looking for promising treatments, experts say, but others are likely to start looking for a cure. The result: an investment bubble in coronaviruses that is already approaching nearly $ 200 billion in market value.

In the past two months alone, Wall Street investors have pumped billions into a handful of biotech companies in the early stages of producing vaccines or drugs to combat the novel coronavirus. Some of these companies are pursuing promising treatments, experts say, but others are likely to strike out on finding a cure. The result: a coronavirus investment bubble that's already approaching nearly $200 billion in stock market value.

"If you look at the most significant diseases outside of Covid-19, like MERS, SARS, Ebola, and Zika, among those diseases, there's been a total of only 45 nonvaccine programs initiated over the last two decades for them,” [Prof. Andrew] Lo said in the statement. “And there's been only one vaccine approved, for Ebola, in December 2019. That's worrisome, because we know for a fact that these diseases are real threats, and yet there's been relatively little attention paid to them.”