I don't think it's exactly a long term goal.  Biotech is in the middle of a rapid development phase, developing vaccines now is useful in the short term.  However, basic research would probably pay a higher ROI in the long term.  Few useful things you could do with that money are really short term goals just vaccinating the young falls into the range of somewhat long term, 40 years from now some of those people would be benefiting from that vaccination.  So it's really a comparison to midrange vs long term.<p>This is not to say I think short term goals are bad, just the fact you need to mix them.  If I had Bill Gates’ wealth I would build a full scale fusion reactor using an updated and modular version of ITER's design.  It might only reduce the time till the first commercial power plant by 10 years but I would still do it