Dr. Richard Moulange

speaker

1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

Instead, I am much more excited about an emerging technology that people in the field really know about already, but it has not necessarily received enough policy attention it deserves, multi-strain vaccines.

And so these would be ones that you can construct them in different ways.

You can put lots of different bits of virus on them in one go, or you can make it so that they target something that is really common across many different viruses in a family.

But these are vaccines that work against

lots of viruses.

So it's not just SARS-2, but also SARS, but also MERS.

These are all different sarbicoviruses.

Or it would work against lots of different pox viruses in one go.

There's a great example of this.

And with the mpox outbreak that we saw a few years ago, governments repurposed their smallpox stockpiles that were there for biological weapons attacks to deploy because they're both pox viruses and there was shared immunity.

It wasn't as good as a targeted mpox vaccine, but it was enough.

But like, okay, sure.

Okay, you have multistrain vaccines.

Why do I care?

The reason you care is that if you can stockpile this in advance, I think, again, this is really important for deterrence.

But this is where you have to make tricky strategic trade-offs because that sort of stockpiled vaccine that's good against all flus or it's good against all sarbocaviruses or coronaviruses or poxviruses will necessarily not be as good against any individual one.

But sometimes that's not what you want.

If we are in a war with an adversary, and it could be a state, it could be an AI system, it might not be that what we want to do is wait for a 90% plus effective vaccine, so have months of vulnerability and then try and deploy across the whole country.

It might be that we need to deploy the armed forces straight away.

And the concern is that if they're all suffering and a good chunk of them are hospitalized,

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