Thought it would be worth sharing here. No doubt, Vitalik will assemble a fantastic team, but still might be worth spreading the word to the best bio risk and covid researchers to reach out and help finding the most underfunded/impactful initiatives.
Vitalik's announcement tweets: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1487073874193702916
1. CryptoRelief sending $100m of the $SHIBA funds back to me. I plan to personally deploy these funds with the help of science advisors to complement CryptoRelief's existing excellent work with some higher-risk higher-reward covid science and relief projects worldwide.
2. I've cofounded a new org (Balvi) to direct these funds, which is in a better position to make these bets which will are very-high-value and global in nature and bring great benefit to Indians and non-Indians. You can follow funds at this address: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa06c2b67e7435ce25a5969e49983ec3304d8e787
3. Projects will include vaccine R&D, innovative approaches to air filtration and ventilation, testing and much more. More info coming soon!
4. You can also follow along CryptoRelief's existing and future excellent work at their transparency page: https://cryptorelief.in/transparency
Question: is there specific great research, or efforts that come to mind, that might be non-obvious to fund (beyond fast grants covid research funding, igem etc.)
There is a pretty good multi-billion-dollar program for biodefense that the Biden administration is pushing for. You could try to support those goals either by contributing to Guarding Against Pandemics, who are lobbying to make sure that said plan actually happens. Or you could try to invest in some more speculative pandemic-prevention technology that isn't covered by the government spending plan; this 80K interview talks about the potential to create broad-spectrum tests for many different infectious diseases and doing metagenomic sequencing to identify new viruses.
Here are some posts describing key EA priorities in biosecurity. Not all of these are relevant to immediate covid relief (creating sealed underground bunkers to guard against X-risk is not going to help anyone right now), but some of them are (like investigating UV sterilization technology and designing better forms of PPE):
Some other things that come to mind:
I'm not sure if these ideas satisfy the "non-obvious to fund" specification in your question, but hopefully something here has been helpful! Sorry that these suggestions have been so heavy on advocacy rather than science; I am not a biologist or anything so I don't have a good picture of that space.
Sounds great! Could toss some more money to 1Day Sooner to work more on advocacy for human challenge trials?