Halstead asks about the performance of groups that EAs have previously funded.
But what about groups that we haven't previously funded, including those that EAs are allied with, or have offered non-monetary support? Who stood out, that we should aim to support in the future?
A group of us developed coviddash.org which was referenced in the NYTimes and had about ~30K visitors, directing between 10K-20K to vaccine trial screening websites or to the sites themselves. We had sites thank us for patients so we know we our counterfactual impact on trial enrollment was >0, but we are not sure of the total number we actually directed. If we accelerated just one vaccine for just one day though we probably helped save a few hundred lives. We were not funded by any EA org but some of us are EA-aligned.
I plan to write a more detailed recap/analysis on this and to discuss accelerating vaccine R&D during pandemics but haven't gotten to it yet because I already moved onto the next project...