The cost vs benefit analysis is: do all of the above. The total amount spent on biotech related to Covid is negligible compared to the cost of Covid. Israel seems to understand this. Many other countries are orders of magnitude off in their analysis.
This is true, but this is not Israel's calculation, far from it.
They are playing a zero-sum game of outbidding others so that they are 1st, no matter what.
Countries like the UK that invested in supply chain efficiencies well ahead of vaccine validation, even as there was risk of the investment failing ... this was acting ahead.
Almost every nation failed at this: we should have all been investing 10x what we did in anything to get the vaccines ready, even for those that ultimately failed because the $20B wasted on unneeded prep would have been less than the amount wasted in our current lock downs that could have been avoided were we already to have been vaccinated.
