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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

The credit here doesn't go to South Korea's government but to a company called Seegene and it's CEO Chun Jong-yoon who directed the company to focus on COVID-19 testing on January 16th. They are the reason South Korea's CDC was able to ramp up 118 labs so quickly. It's making about 10,000 test kits a week and has been at the center of South Korea's testing strategy.

The market is better at addressing problems than government and if the FDA and CDC hadn't gotten in the way in the US, our testing response would have been far better.

Seegene's kits test for all three marker genes and aren't even available in the US because it doesn't yet have FDA approval. At least 30 other countries are placing orders for Seegene's kits.

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it wasn't "the market" that solved this problem. it was the employees, including the ceo, at that company who felt a duty to the rest of the country, not to some market opportunity, that effected the result.

bureaucracies, including corporate ones (see: innovator's dilemma), are typically not nimble enough to respond to rapidly changing circumstances. it's not a market vs government (false) dichotomy.

> it was the employees, including the ceo, at that company

that is the market doing its thing.

The CEO made that decision 4 days before South Korea had its first case.

If you ban private companies from making tests, then people like that CEO are blocked from trying.

The market is just shorthand for people.

I mean, the CEO and the employees are literally part of the free market.

Sure, but he’s saying it wasn’t market forces that motivated them but their sense of civic duty.

That is something that “the market” often lacks in their relentless pursuit of shareholder value.

On what fact is he basing it on civic duty? There's literally nothing to support that. They started work on the tests before the disease even arrived in South Korea. It was the CEO reacting to perceived likelihood of future demand for such kits.

The market might often lack it, but isn't that simply an untapped resource? After the crisis is done the company can go on claiming how much they did to help far and wide. It's hard to find a better advertisement, especially since it's the company itself that's helping and not just some endorsement from elsewhere.

Are you saying the CEO didn't consider, at all, the business implications of focusing on producing the tests?

> That is something that “the market” often lacks in their relentless pursuit of shareholder value.

This is nuts. The market doesn't pursue shareholder value. Corporations do. However, the market, which consists of consumers and small producers as much as corporations, certainly does not always, as is seen in consumers (and frankly corporations as well) oftentimes irrational behavior.

I concur that my statement is not entirely accurate, but if we apply the same nuance to the general sentiment I was replying to, surely we will conclude that we should absolutely not rely upon “the market” to prepare for and carry out disaster response.

So is the wild animal trade that introduced the virus? I mean if something is just shorthand for "things people do", it gets credit and blame for a lot of things...

It's better defined as things people do freely, and out of self interest (that's flawed too, but it's better).

And yep, that trade is "market" too. And it does get blamed for a lot of things, some of them unwarranted.

Depending on what you mean by "self interest", it sounds like market forces are why people fall in love, nurture their children, volunteer at the hospice, listen to stories around the campfire, say their prayers at night, and brush their teeth before bed...

I suspect that the CEO and the companies employees gave two shits about your precious free market when they decided to implement a crash program to develop tests.

South Korean here. I must point out that there are four companies in South Korea with Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 testing and Seegene is not the only supplier, or even the first supplier (the first is Kogene). Four companies, in order of authorization, are Kogene, Seegene, Solgent, and SD Biosensor.

Huh, I'm sure the FDA/CDC doesn't ban biotech companies from researching testing kits? You only need FDA approval if you're going to make it available to the general public.

SK is really lucky that they have that company who was focused on testing kits and even uses machine learning to quickly identify viruses. Why doesn't the US have such a company? Is it regulations? Surely not, when something like Theranos was allowed.

Healthcare is notoriously difficult to “disrupt” due to regulations and how the medical system is set up. I once worked for a healthcare startup and we joked that 1) your customer does not pay you and does not respond to price 2) your customer does not even choose the product and does not respond to product quality 3) you cannot even refine your product freely without getting someone’s approval on every change, for a fee. I understand everyone is happy about the downfall and disgrace of Theranos and rightly so, but I am a bit sad when the general consensus is to take all these regulations as self-evident because “you cannot play with people’s life”. There are definitely areas in healthcare that can have less stringent and rigid requirements, and today we can see that certain diagnostics is a good candidate. Expanding right-to-try [1] would be a step forward too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-try_law

If the market was good at addressing problems, our shelves wouldn't be empty of masks and hand sanitizer for the last SEVERAL weeks. Trump had to ask 3M to make more asks.

There's plenty of demand. Where's the supply? Market failure.

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