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Comment by zoobab | Hacker News Reader

Good news for US BigPharma Merck holding the Oxford patents, while public funding has paid for its research:

Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal.

Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe.

For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.

Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.

The patent protects from somebody simply copying the formula. Which is many orders of magnitude cheaper than doing research and development, especially on human subjects.

> If the research has been already paid out

Why does that matter if the research and development costs were publicly funded?

Because they can and it will make them a ton of money.

The laws need to change.

But, for instance - public money is used to build roads, yet companies that build them make money in the process. There is no state-owned road building company. What's the difference here?

You don't die if you can't afford to drive on the road. That's the difference.

But most places(at least around the EU) have already announced that the vaccine will be free - so there is no question about affordability?

The taxes still paid for it twice

In what way? Yes, the taxes paid for research, then taxes paid to purchase the product. But if everything was state owned top to bottom, the taxes would have had to fund research, then manufacturing, production and distribution. I wager the amount of money spent would have been exactly the same, so it's more like an accounting trick than an actual difference.

Its not about manufacturing costs. The companies continue to own the patents and after some period of time have every plan to start charging for use of it. This means they can get rich for decades off of the taxpayer-funded research. Meanwhile the governments have agreed to take on the risk by buying tens of millions of doses before they vaccines are even approved which means some of them will likely be waste due to either not getting approval or coming after more effective drugs.

Socialized risk and privatized profits. A capitalist's dream.

To go back to your highway analogy, its as if the government contracted for the entire interstate highway system to be built and then let various private companies charge a perpetual toll to use the roads in addition to the money they made for building it.

Its not an accounting trick, its a perpetual royalty on the taxpayer's expense if the drug works (and a profit even if their drug never passes Phase 3 clinical trials).

Public money pays for the roads. After the road is built, the road belongs to the public. Public money pays for the research. After the research finishes, the results should belong to the public, the same way as the road does.

The public can of course sell (i), charge (ii) or monetize in any other way.

(i) e.g. privatization of telephone networks

(ii) e.g. toll roads and bridges

> After the road is built, the road belongs to the public.

Depending on where you live, you could very well be under the impression that the roads belong to delivery companies, taxis, etc. (private companies that make money off them) as they are effectively useless to everyone else (= the public) while they are constantly blocking them.

They belong to a publicly funded research institute that was given the right by the public to sell it's research to private enterprise.

The 'public' wanted that by voting in the lawmakers making that possible.

That's how democracy works.

Also we're not talking about physical things, but something 'intellectual' like software, so the comparison is inaccurate.

More accurate would be IT research done in a publicly funded university.

Is another state going to get sued for having a different company build a road of the same material? I dunno, maybe Asphalt Co should be getting license fees for every road built. Maybe even add a toll booth so drivers have to pay a license fee to Asphalt Co to drive on their roads

Noam Chomsky has quite a bone to pick about toll roads

That’s a faulty parallel. The road belongs to the public, while only the building is tendered to a private (in a presumably competitive market) to maximize quality and price ratio.

In this case the building is publicly funded for a profit AND the final result donated in “perpetuity” to make it a private TOLL road.

Double dip?

(I’m ok with subsidizing the research, and even negotiating a bulk manufacturing contract with an agreed margin... but a patent? Isn’t that bending too far?)

My village has their own road building and repairing department--mostly used for repairing. It's called the department of public works. We have our own utility company too. Both of those end up being cheaper than the having private companies do it.

Trials and regulatory approvals are a huge cost too.

If the government paid for all of that (including opportunity costs + a decent margin), then the government should have asked for the patent rights (or at least a commitment on pricing).

Has any serious journalist looked into exactly what the world governments paid for and exactly what the deals with the drug companies look like?

All I can find are biased opinion pieces devoid of actual information.

The FT had some coverage of this, but it wasn't massively in depth. The one thing I remember is that the AZ would be sold without profit until the end of the pandemic, which was contractually defined as June 2021.

Incidentally, if you want serious journalism, the FT is worth paying for.

Just because they hold the patent doesn't mean they won't license it out. We're talking about the entire world here.

I know a lot of people, Americans in particular, are weary of 'big pharma' and for-profit healthcare. And Americans have good reason for that mistrust. But this isn't just an American issue.

Other governments such as the EU and India will force their hand if needed for the public good. As they've done countless times in the past. We just need to get this developed and manufactured as fast as possible.

And the linked article said the clash was between this pharmaceutical behemoth or a startup from the university. I'll take the behemoth now.

"The scientists’ small biotech company—a spinout partially funded by Oxford—was refusing to hand over intellectual-property rights. To outflank their bosses, the scientists asked a London investment banker to help explore other potential deals."

I care. Just like about the bailouts. Socializing the funding/losses and privatizing the profits is just pure corruption.

The nominal world economy 'GDP' was $90T in 2019 [0]. An economic contraction of 5% because of the pandemic would mean a loss of $4500B. If a vaccine helps to avoid that, even a cost of dozens of billion dollars for it would be peanuts in comparison. This is only the economic cost avoided let alone the human tragedies.

Edit: german Wikipedia suggest that the contraction is only expected to be 3% but because of the numbers involved even that doesn't really matter for the argument.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy

This is also how criminal mobs operate, in terms of protection money, extortion, ransom, etc. The underlying economic principle is the same ("gee, sure would be a shame if this expensive thing X were to break..."). Beware of relying on this as the only reason to justify the cost.

Hopefully there is some other significant differentiating characteristic or attribute to justify this state of affairs between society and big pharma, that would distinguish it from the same analysis you would use to pay a ransom or protection fee.

This is not a good argument.

We are talking about a company providing a service. They might not have invented the vaccine but they are providing the means to bring it from proof of concept into mass production. The commenter seemed to think that this isn't worth money.

I argue that you get quite a bang for the buck.

The question is not if it’s valuable, the question is if it’s subsided. Farmers producing corn add some value to the process, but in western countries ~100% of their profits are from government subsidies. This does incentivize them to be more efficient, but it also means their constantly looking for a larger handout.

In the case of farm subsidies it’s grown to the point of being actively unhealthy both in economic terms and the actual root cause of the obesity epidemic. Without sufficient calories you can’t have an obese population due to physics. Medical subsidies have resulted in a host of related problems not just in economic costs, but also in what research gets done and how efficient that is.

The cost of Medical studies in the US has grown wildly out of proportion because their a profit center. This perversely slows down the rate of medical research, even in the case of emergencies like covid 19.

citation? That seems very unlikely. US farmers constantly look for greater efficiencies. They are also among the most conservative about land policy i.e. erosion, chemical application etc because it costs them money.

Citation for what?

On average your looking at ~90B in net profits from farming, the subsidies however are much harder to track down. Ethanol subsides for example are often excluded as are insurance, tariffs etc.

So, just talking thru the hat were we? As you say, you can't point to support for that statement about '100% of profits'.

Ahh, no it simply wasn’t clear what you where asking about.

There are a lot of ways to slice this up. “Overall agricultural subsidies in 2010 were estimated at $172 billion by a European agricultural industry association; however, the majority of this estimate consists of food stamps and other consumer subsidies, so it is not comparable to the 2005 estimate.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...

One example of this is Americans for example pay 3 billion dollars more for sugar than international market rates. But, only a fraction of that directly ends up in farmers pockets. You can either take the full 3 billion as a government subsidy or exclude most of it. Similarly, propaganda and what’s allowed in food lunch programs gets tricky.

So, I am not endorsing any specific estimate, just saying the total industry profits are approximately the same as the total subsidy. Add up just direct federal subsidies gets you lower numbers especially if you try an exclude state, ethanol, R&D, loans, Education, tax breaks, and other less obvious handouts.

PS: Silly me, I forgot about all the little exceptions in environmental, immigration, labor laws, use of federal lands, etc.

> Without sufficient calories you can’t have an obese population due to physics.

Sure you can, you just have starving poor people too.

You don’t get a significant percentage of the population to obese in a famine. Simply maintaining obesity across over 40% of the population takes a lot of energy, let alone morbid obesity numbers.

Yes you certainly can. Famines are not spread equally. The people that can afford to have food shipped in (i.e. anyone who can afford to order things on Amazon) could comfortably remain fat while the entire lower class in their local area suffered from a famine.

Having food shipped in still requires it to be created somewhere to be shipped out.

It’s very possible for some percentage of the population to starve even during a food surplus, but starving people will bid up the cost of food to the point where you can’t get a 40% of the population to have a surplus in a famine in any society that we know about.

Here is the official definition for the minimum to qualify as a famine:

“At least 20% of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope The prevalence of acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30% The death rate exceeds two people per 10,000 people per day“

That’s killing off over 7% of the population per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_South_Sudan_famine

56% overweight or obese: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18714...

It's not an "argument" per se, as in whether we should or shouldn't pay the pharma companies. Of course we should pay pharma for this for COVID, and of course it is "worth it." There is no argument (from me at least) about that tactical decision.

My larger point is that for-profit pharma/healthcare is not a healthy marketplace (... or at best, it's an immature one). In the not-so-distant past (in America, up until the Civil War or thereabouts), firefighting was mostly privatized (meaning not government-run) [0], and brigades would compete (literally sometimes fighting in the streets, covering the hydrant to impede rival brigades, etc.) to claim the prize of the insurance payout for saving a building [1], which doesn't really serve the interests of the victims of fires.

I think the incentives of for-profit firefighters are not all that dissimilar from the incentives of modern pharma companies today (i.e. pay us to save your building from this fire, vs pay us to research this vaccine), and I would hope to evolve this pharma industry and this marketplace (of "demand" for life/health, vs "supply" of pharma research and resources) into something more mature and with fewer perverse incentives in the long-run.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#United...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Modern...

I was not familiar with the history of firefighting until now and this is pretty wild. Thank you for clarifying what you meant with your earlier comment. I agree that for-profit healthcare and pharma is a huge problem, exactly because of the misaligned incentives for companies and patients.

You missed the point that we already paid for the development of this vaccine by paying taxes. We should now only pay for the production, not for the intellectual property rights.

OR we could look at it as if the pandemic has already cost us 4.5T based on your figures, and that's enough. We come together and defeat the virus without anyone profiting - we all lose, we've all lost already, ffs, let's let people profit off of the death, because why not?

If "we" gave you $20B to move a vaccine from proof-of-concept to production, could you do it? I know I couldn't... That's a service, it's worth money, it's worth paying for.

Edit: people don't seem to understand that there are several stages in pharma development... (1) research, (2) trials, (3) scaling production. It sounds to me that even if (1) and (2) are "paid for" (with public money), (3) is still non-trivial and therefore expensive.

> it's worth paying for

And "we" are already paying for it. Let's not let them double-dip.

No, we're only paying for part of 'it'. The cure isn't just research, it's also logistics and there does not exist a capable non-profit to do the logistics part of it in such a short time. Also you underestimate how much it costs to build such a supply chain capable of producing and shipping that many vaccines around the world. Hint: the research costs are just a fraction of the logistics cost, you just don't see that up front because it's also used to ship other stuff besides vaccines.

These things cost money, and you assume your taxes are covering them in full. They don't.

I think the key desire is that the intellectual property, built from publicly funded research, should not be owned by a single corporation. Production and distribution are of tremendous value and these companies should be rewarded for providing that value. But the vaccine itself? Why not let others invest capital and try to produce & distribute the vaccine?

especially to the shareholders ... holding shares and getting dividends (and no, for a 100 year old company these people didn't invest at all in the business case. They invested in a financial product.)

You’re being overly reductionist and dismissive.

No one is claiming otherwise. And back to normal is still a long ways off.

If you’re admitting we’re giving them money for a thing, it’s paid for. I don’t know why you quote it like that, transfer payments of public money to private institutions is a thing, is it up for debate it happens?

Also cost is emotional. Does it have to be 20 billion or is the government handing out cheddar for consulting jobs later?

There’s more too it than high school capitalist theory. Just because you can’t for $20 billion doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t for $5.

But we hide the work in private accounts. Humanities work, built towards by countless hands and minds.

Yeah ok we get it, Murray Rothbard; You’re only 1 in 7 billion. Why does your theory matter? Roll up them sleeves. What? He’s dead? In the bin with it, no need to carry water for a dead man.

This is not corrupt. It’s money well spent. The benefits to us all are most likely more valuable than anything we’ve spent on vaccine research. Government balance sheets also probably come out ahead on that investment given that the alternative is an economy with a raging pandemic and resulting lower tax base.

Then there is the logistical effort of manufacturing the vaccine at the scale and speed required. There are huge capital investments and risks associated with doing that. If a company wants to do that and seek the profits from that, great. Literally everyone comes out ahead. You, me, the government, the manufacturer, distributor, and every other business or person in the economy.

What is the alternative? We create a government agency that specializes in manufacturing and distributing pharma products?

> What is the alternative? We create a government agency that specializes in manufacturing and distributing pharma products?

Yes. Why don't you think that would work?

It's laughable that you're getting downvoted. Socialist. /S

Because the government hasn't been able to do anything right for 270 years, why do you think they're suddenly gonna wake up a figure out mass manufacturing?

We can't educate our kids at an acceptable level without billions of dollars being donated on top of all the tax collected, we can't figure out how to make medicare work responsibly despite literally being able to control costs, what do you think makes drug manufacturing any different?

In the US, one party has dedicated itself to making sure the government is dysfunctional for a _long_ time so that it can run on the platform that government doesn’t work and we should privatize everything. This is not a fact of nature, it’s a willful decision. For example, the US used to be a leader in education. The thing that changed since then is one party started defunding education and moving that money to private prisons and defense.

If we as a people collectively agreed that we are as smart as other countries, there’s no reason we can’t have a functional government that can handle public education and vaccine efforts and keep us safe and maintain our infrastructure and everything else we expect our government to do for us.

If your statement was true, Chicago and California would be bastions of government efficiency and capability. Instead we see both Republican and Democratic cities do terribly on most measures, and those cities that generally prosper have very little to do with who is in control other than it not being a single party and they have the right conditions for job growth.

School funding happens at the state level too, not just the federal grants.

It's funny you bring that up, because my comment originally even included a bit about how a lot of our current problems can be traced back to Reagan's presidency. He was previously governor of California. Guess when California stopped offering free higher education?

Chicago is in Illinois, which has had a lot of flip-flopping between red and blue governors and has an infamous history of governors going to jail for corruption.

Also I'm not claiming that Democrats haven't done shitty things. Daley bankrupted Chicago and privatized a lot of our public services while running as a Democrat and some of those jailed governors were democrats, but I do think the GOP is more homogeneous in its efforts to break down the government. I mean privatizing everything is a platform they openly campaign on!

If your claim that prosperity has nothing to do with who is in charge were true, we wouldn't see a pattern of blue states outperforming red states economically or a national pattern of economic growth after a democrat president and decline after a republican president.

Coincidentally, I live in Chicago and used to live in California. People love to use both places as punching bags when talking about national problems, despite one being a state and the other a city! It's different types/scales of problems.

> He was previously governor of California. Guess when California stopped offering free higher education?

And why hasn’t California added free public education or expanded housing in the last 20-30 years then?

Many cities have and are. It's worth pointing out that there are literally millions of Trump supporters here, and plenty of Republican politicians to boot. It's not like California is pure blue.

Plus, democrats are conservatives, so, it's not like they're automatically leftists just because they're blue.

> Many cities have and are

No, there is not free public education anymore so in California than Texas.

> It's worth pointing out that there are literally millions of Trump supporters here

Don’t try to blame them. They have no power at the state and even the extremely Trump-devoid Bay Area (iirc <10% support) has failed to offer anything approximating a solution to housing or good education. The answer to shitty schools in the bay was a lottery to make sure everyone got to suffer the shit, rather than you know... fixing the shitty schools.

> Because the government hasn't been able to do anything right for 270 years, why do you think they're suddenly gonna wake up a figure out mass manufacturing?

worked just fine for penicillin during world war 2

Not when it's a monopoly. That means the company gets to exploit the results of the research for their own profit, without any competition to keep prices reasonable. Non-exclusive deals are fine. Exclusive ones are not.

Look, I understand the frustration but they're not going to set this price. This thing is way bigger than this company and even the entire pharmaceutical industry. This is a global crisis.

Many governments have proven that they will put the public's need over these companies need. They've broken patents and pressured companies before and they will obviously do it again.

There are more governments in the world than the American one.

For now speed is of the essence and this it's wonderful news they've set another step.

I'm not a public policy, legal, or economics expert, but I certainly favor treating this as a one-off. If a legal monopoly is the most expedient way to get us back to normal, so be it, and if fears of price gouging are a concern let congress or the executive or whomever cap the price. Once things get back to normal we can litigate the monopoly issue.

That’s a fair point. I guess my underlying assumption would be the government funding the research would retain rights to the research as well. Thanks for pointing that out.

Would you rather hold on to your anti-corporate principles or have a safe and effective vaccine to protect the most vulnerable in the world? These public-private partnerships aren't ideal, but there hasn't been any other way in history to develop safe vaccines on such short timeline.

How is this any different than a government bond program meant to finance the projects? Whether the profit is derived via increased stock price, or derived from interest paid by the government directly through taxes, how is it fundamentally different? The government can't typically just print money (to keep the economy okay). It has to either derive tax to get the funds, or borrow, which again privatizes the profit (in the form of interest).

You don't get it. Developing vaccines is nothing like making cars. Our understanding of how the human body works is comical compared to our understanding of materials science and engineering, design and other aspects of making cars.

Developing vaccines is a long, treacherous journey on a narrow ledge with cliffs on either side from start to finish. Infectious diseases research has seen a sharp decline in funding and commercial interest in general. Because of how little we know about the body, most research doesn't generate results that can be turned into money. The only way to continue to support research is via public funds and grants. The public funding of science has been a major contributing factor for our advancements in this kind of research.

The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research.

I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.

Manufacturing takes time and money to develop. Revenue should pay for those costs. The non-profit gains experience, but no profit. The for-profit gains profit. If the for-profit decides to raise prices too high, there will be a willing and capable competitor waiting in the wings.

> The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research.

Now we can disagree on term length, but, a temporary monopoly to a company is what a patent is defined as and lasts 20 years.

Patents are one tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Publicly funded research is a different tool. Usually, patents are based on privately funded research.

the problem is for a competitor to emerge, they have to do a lot of work after X years.

My proposal is to have a company parallel develop processes so we can have competitor after expiry immediately. The competitor can't profit from it, but it can do work at 0 cost.

Exactly. The idea that the public funds research, but corporations can monopolies the results of that research for profit, is just disgusting. Non-exclusive deals are fine. Exclusive ones not, at least not within the country/countries that funded it; they already paid for it, and denying them access is basically theft.

Drug companies also fund their own research, to the tune of massive expenditures. What you’re suggesting would incentive these companies to disengage from partnerships involving public funding. Whoever pays for the research, each company’s goal is to profitably sell a non-generic treatment. If the only way they can do that is to eschew public funds, they will do this and the result will be less cooperation and a far reduced ability for the government to influence the direction of private sector research, and more importantly shape private sector manufacturing and the quantities of specific treatments supplied to the market.

Honestly, this is overblown. Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing, and the R&D mostly goes to repatenting efforts or incremental repurposings. They rarely come out with anything new, and if you look at recent years you may as well say that they never do.

You hit the nail right on the head. This is the same with basically every consumer product in capitalism, which is why it’s so inappropriate for life saving medicine.

Maybe I'm mistaken here, but one such case was Sofosbuvir and its pricing was indeed very controversial.

Rant. Prime time TV is now pharma pushing their drugs with the occasional programming jammed between the ads. All those ads are coming from their extreme markups. Placebo and manufacturing artifacts aside, a molecule is a molecule, buying generics should be the default. It is bad enough, but the real disgrace is pharma salespeople masquerading as GPs prescribing meds according to who is sponsoring them. Instead of telling people about the active ingredient they send them to buy BRAND. At least this is my experience in the 2nd world.

The FDA has made 42 new drug approvals in 2020: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/new-drugs-fda-cders-new-molecular-...

Certainly some of those are new uses for existing drugs, but drug trials ain't cheap either.

Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing

Often repeated, but the data doesn't bear it out, especially in aggregate.

https://www.raps.org/getattachment/5578195e-ed51-4f03-8adc-c...

The article that graph comes from indicates that is self-reported data from the companies which may not be consistent in what is considered R&D vs. marketing cost.

https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2019/7/...

> I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.

Not-for-profit manufacturing would have to be done by the government itself, wouldn't it? Otherwise, what other entity would and could actually pay to set that up?

Non-profit companies exist all over the US. Even non-profit drug manufacturing is done to some extent, but at a much smaller scale right now than we could have. The companies still charge money for services, the employees get paid, but the governance of the company is not focused solely on increasing profit margins. Most medical core science is done non-profit right now, at US universities. Many universities have on-premise small-scale manufacturing capabilities which serve their own needs, in medical labs but also others, like materials sciences and chemical science/engineering. There's no intrinsic reason why those couldn't be ramped up, or even pooled between physically close universities by creating a joint non-profit entity.

Society at large is being asked to make drastic adjustments because of a collective health issue.

Why is the corporate "right to make profit" sacrosanct when nothing else is?

This is a clear case of Eminent Domain. All mandated, mandatory, Covid-19 related products must be offered at cost, or even better, we should just nationalize drug companies. We're all in this together and companies need to adjust to "new normal" as well.

Totally agree. This is not the time for bean counters. We need to fix this and we need to do it now.

This is completely incoherent. Consider a book author who has a monopoly on for profit publishing, but anyone else can publish for no profit.

The book author’s expected profits would plummet as it would be the wild west in production.

What you’re really saying is “we should pay massively less for vaccine development”. Which again, sounds nice, but....why would anyone have developed a vaccine? It’s a complex project which costs billions and has taken 12+ months while taking resources away from competing projects.

The public money is an incentive to get people to put those considerations aside and devote all their resources to vaccine development. This is a sensible public investment in a return to normalcy.

Then it needs to be a cost-plus model. They should absolutely be able to make a profit for manufacturing and handling logistics. They shouldn't be making a 4000% profit when "we" collectively funded all the research.

The possibility of them 'being able to do that' is because of laws that got passed by democratically elected officials.

If you don't like that, vote someone in power who regulates that more.

The problem with these discussions is that nobody tells their opinions to their representative, they just blurt it out into the 'aether' on a rando internet forum.

True change starts with calling your representative. If they don't do what you ask them to, then have other people ask as well. Finally, have them vote them out of office if a sufficient ammount of people want the same thing that the representative won't do (eg. represent their constituents).

>If you don't like that, vote someone in power who regulates that more.

That's an awful lot of assumptions on your part. I have voted out someone who didn't represent these values in exchange for someone who does. I don't need to contact my representative on this specific issue because I already know where she stands, but if we were in disagreement I would (and have).

Posting about it on the internet is to garner additional support and discussion... you know the entire reason HN exists?

What about holders of patents funded by govt also paying royalties?

Just a notion I've been pondering. Sure, taxation could do the same job. Hypothetically. Hollywood accounting and such.

Maybe straight up royalties would be less prone to gamification.

I care. I care that we look past the end of our nose for public health to give the Saulks of the world a chance and let the billionaires grab some fucking pine.

As a US taxpayer, I care. Why am I paying twice for the same product, that makes the outcome worse for everyone on average.

Luckily for you, Oxford University is British. Public funding refers to the UK governement. Btw AstraZeneca is also British.

> not some non-profit startup.

There's no(t necessarily a) question of any non-profit startup there. The problem is that the people who paid for the development of the product should also hold rights over the product. If the vaccine was developed with public money, it should be publicly available -- not necessarily (but yes, also to) non-profit startups, but also to any other manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry, since they (allegedly, in any case...) pay taxes, too, and have therefore invested in this product.

If Merck wants to use their proven manufacturing base with an excellent delivery track record (which nobody is denying, after all), that's great. They can:

1. Put their money into the development of said vaccine, or

2. Acquire the license to manufacture it, at a reasonable price, like they do with any technology that wasn't developed using public money, or

3. If we don't want stuff that's already been paid for with public money to be sold to manufacturers, which I don't disagree with at all, then, sure, they should get it for free -- but in that case they shouldn't be the sole owner of the rights towards that product, either.

(Edit: FWIW, I'm all for 3. I've worked in the medical industry and I know full well that there's a great deal of work that goes between first-stage research and final production, and that it's incredibly hard and expensive to take the result of a publicly-funded research program and turn it into a product. That doesn't change the fact that said research programs are publicly-funded -- their results should be available to anyone who paid for them. If someone wants exclusive rights to the result of some research program, then they're welcome to pay for it themselves.)

As it stands now, they own the rights (including licensing rights!) to a bunch of products that they haven't paid for at all.

All the suits blabber on and on and on about how the government should keep its nose out of their business. How about they tell the government where to stick it when it's about paying for their research, too?

> I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal.

The government did this. They are the ones who put the restrictions in place. They are the ones who choose not to remove them.

The government pulled a fast one on most people: They broke our leg, they handed us a crutch, and we thank them.

Don't pretend the vaccine is our savior. The government has the power to end the restrictions at any time but they choose not to.

"I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal."

Sounds like the media panic is working.

Indeed, people willing to give up anything. I don't see any return to'normal' anytime soon

I mean, I would gladly give companies a couple of billions if it means people stop panicking and we all can start living again. The vaccine doesn't even have to actually work.

They don't need the patent in order manufacture the vaccine. Only allowing one company to manufacture the vaccine (or to control who manufactures the vaccine) will likely rise prices.

The United States Military has the best logistics system in the world. I'd rather have them handle manufacturing and rollout than either a multinational or a startup.

The US government has one of the worst track records in the entire Western world when it comes to access to healthcare and affordable medicine.

They also have 0 experience in developing a vaccine and it's transport.

But I guess they can transport some tanks and troops quickly, sure.

> Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal.

This kind of thinking is worrisome to me. It sets a horrible precedent. Previously in times of war private business would be forced into helping the people fight a common enemy. These days a war on a virus has zero help from business and they essentially have a position of power to sit on their hands taking billions of public subsidy and then take the people's money and effort for their own.

Why do we take this with such apathy? Why is it that a country run by the people for the people has no power in the populace hands? We are doing everything we can to help, committing billions of dollars which represents millions of hours of public production to solve a problem that CEOs only want to assist in if they can up their share price.

Since we care so much about our health and the health of loved ones why have we not used these unprecedented times to reform the healthcare industry?

We are paying twice for this. Once to fund the research, which we then give away, and then again for the manufacture and distribution which is priced as if the pharma did all the research. These vaccines are going to cost anywhere between $15 and $37 a shot. You cannot tell me that's how much these vaccines cost to make in quantity. Why is there any profit at all? Let's get ourselves out of this shit without encumbering any more debt on top of an economy that is already falling into a black hole.

This stuff is morally corrupt, and to say 'who cares' makes me sad. We should care, maybe we accept the shit we have, but we should care about it. This stuff should be criticized, we should use our agency to change what is wrong, not to support it.

Every day I fear we are all fucked. This sort of thinking is why we deserve the likes of Trump and Boris. We bring this crap on ourselves and then moan about it.

You talk about getting back to 'normal', well we slowly sold normal. These decisions do not have zero impact on the future, they affirm a shitty attitude and set the path for future generations who won't know any better.

/rant

Do you think that the more profit available to pharma, the more capable the workers attracted to the field will be? And therefore the faster results will be achieved? I don’t mean just the bench scientists, but all the other people - programmers, lawyers, managers, fabrication engineers, supply chain ops, etc - required to take an idea from paper to mass production. Having worked in biotech startups myself I understand how inefficient the current system is, but at the same time I can’t foresee a better one.

None of this speaks to the social cancer that is corporations draining the society they function in. Individuals are expected to sacrifice and pull together, do the research, finance pharma production, give away patents, and yet the big pharmaceutical sits back and drains all of this into their stock. It's just not right.

Let them make a profit when we are thriving not while everyone else is suffering and making sacrifices.

Could you please indicate where you heard that Merck has any ownership of the patents to the Oxford vaccine? The cited article indicates that it’s is AstraZeneca who have done a deal with Oxford and that the deal with Merch, while an early option, fell though.

Is would seem “US BigParma” are not involved, as AstraZeneca is a British/Swedish company.

Merck's stock is down while Astrazenca's is up, thats enough indication that merck doesnt hold anything.

AstraZeneca is BigPharm! May not be as Merck or Pfizer, but they are on the big ones.

Yes, but it’s bizarre to complain about the deal while not knowing enough about it to even accurately remember which company was a signatory to it.

yeah it is just how the world we live in now days works. Most people don't know who owns what!

For example, Russians owns a bunch of funds in US mutual funds, and us big oil owns a lot stakes in Russian oils. So the whole idea that we are still living in the idea of nation state is over! Private company (like Federal reserve) has their own military.

Trump signed the moon mining order: https://www.space.com/trump-moon-mining-space-resources-exec...

We are pretty much back to West/East India Company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company ) in the process of becoming a multi-planetary civilisation.

Most things are hidden behind attorney-client privilege and ran by a hand full of law-firms for the elite rich people. Someone who have managed billions dollars for the public and private sector has once said no body really know who owns the debt of the planet.

Personally I support more transparency let everything come out and let the people judge. There is the risk of anger of mop and chopping off some heads like the French did. Truth will set you free, at first if fucking piss you off. Hope everyone will exercise some constrains and respect the due process even for those who have done so much bad things.

According to that article Merck got cut out of the deal and Oxford will get 6% royalties on the vaccine, from a UK/Swedish outfit. So nothing to do with US big pharma and Oxford will get upwards of £100m. It’s not is if they’d have got nothing out of the Merck deal either.

This is very disappointing. A lot of people are posting on this thread based on this misinformation.

I'm sure they paid for the patent. From your linked article:

"Merck proposed giving Oxford around 1% of royalties, according to people familiar with the negotiations, with a sliver of that going to Vaccitech."

If I'm reading everything correctly then they don't? The deal with Merck didn't go through and they don't have the Oxford vaccine?

I was under the impression there was an exclusive agreement in place with AstraZeneca but the general terms for access to Oxford's IP was:

https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/technologies-available/technolog...

The story appears to tell exactly the opposite of your comment : Merck failed to do a deal because Oxford held out for public good outcomes that Merck wouldn't meet, and AZ did.

it seems more like a collaboration. the private sector doesnt have the money or incentive to do such a thing (at an individual business level) but they have the ability to execute on it if incentivized.

the public sector doesnt have the agility or flexibility to do such a thing but they definitely have the money and incentives to make it happen.

the two combine to create a big, powerful, fast-moving machine that solves a problem.

Vaccines are far from big money.

I thought the vaccine was going to be free anyway?

Someone is going to pay. It may not be you at the point of the needle, but somebody will.

Governments will pay a lot to get their economies going again. That burden will in turn fall on taxpayers one way or another; whether it's directly via taxes or budget cuts or indirectly via inflation or debt service.

Yes, I realize that. My comment was in response to the criticism of these companies being funded by tax dollars while being granted a patent. The implication being that we're paying (as taxpayers) but getting nothing in return since we would have to pay for the vaccine anyway.

My response is that we're getting the vaccine for free in return.

That said, I'm not sure that it's actually going to be free. That's just what I heard. I should point that out - I don't want to propagate bad info.

What you get in return is somebody (the government) took the risk of a blind faith payment to have a university develop a vaccine.

That's what you paid for, not for production, not for distribution, not for anything else.

You didn't pay taxes for a free vaccine, because you don't pay remotely enough taxes for that to be viable at all. Unless every country on earth takes their fair share of blind-faith financing a single company.

What the public paid for is nowhere near enough to produce a vaccine.

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