Giving Compass' Take:

• Clifton Leaf explains how an experimental vaccine developed by a for-profit company helped avert a potential Ebola disaster. 

• How can businesses orient their decision-making around social good as well as profits? 

• Find out how to increase the odds for a positive triple bottom line. 

On May 3rd, reports that a strange and frightening illness had struck more than 20 people in the village of Ikoko-Impenge reached health officials in the province of Équateur, on the western border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. By May 8, the Ministry of Health confirmed what many had feared: Ebola was back.

By mid-July it was over. Instead of more than 11,000 deaths—the grisly toll of the 2014–2016 epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea—this one killed 33 and never spread far beyond its immediate zone of infection.

There was much that was different this time around. Both local health officials and the World Health Organization had responded with lightning speed. And now there was something else to contain the spread: an experimental vaccine.

The vaccine, codeveloped by Merck kept Ebola in check through a protective ring of immunization, with health workers vaccinating virtually everyone who may have been in contact with a person infected with the virus. And while it’s still too early to tell (and another outbreak has since begun), the new vaccine and immunization strategy may well be a turning point in the battle against one of the scariest diseases of the past century—and perhaps even give us clues to staving off other viral epidemics.

Merck’s investment in the Ebola vaccine has been prodigious. The company tested it in the crucible of past outbreaks. And the production of each vial of this live attenuated vaccine, combined from the DNA of different viral components, is so complex that it takes a full year to complete, says Beth-Ann Coller, who heads up Merck’s Ebola research efforts. But the drug giant isn’t doing this out of charity. Rather, the company’s vaccine business—which includes inoculations against pneumonia, shingles, and the cancer-causing HPV—had more than $6 billion in sales last year. Even if the Ebola vaccine doesn’t make gobs of money on its own, the knowledge gained from developing it should help inform R&D across the business.

Read the full article about profit incentives to do good by Clifton Leaf at Fortune.