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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out?

Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be made there. Instead licenses should be more profitable since time is worth a lot of money.

There are also a lot of vaccines under development. There should always be multiple well resourced efforts under way. Unfortunately it seems some promising alternatives for development, testing or mass production have been starved for funding.

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> Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out?

In the case of the mRNA vaccines, according to comments I saw on some prior COVID vaccine discussion, they depend on specialized precursors that not many companies can make.

mRNA vaccines are still quite new. Some human mRNA vaccines were developed before COVID, but they didn't do well in testing and none were approved. With no one needing to make mRNA vaccines in more than research and trial quantities, not many companies developed the capacity to make the prerequisites.

The issue then is not getting Pfizer to license their vaccine to some other company to make too. It's that Pfizer is already making as much of it as can be made right now due to precursor availability limits.

It's not clear to me that there is any idle production capacity. Pfizer, Moderna and AZ got to the approval gate first, but they started their lines months in advance knowing they needed to start delivering orders. I assume that's true of everywhere.

The simple truth is that there is no plausible way to deliver all the vaccines that nations want to inject right now, and given the size of the project there's no way that distribution is going to be fair. That is true at local levels (c.f. media stories of US boutique clinics getting vaccine before urban hospitals) and global ones the same.

The US and UK have an advantage of larger existing pharma industries and so have a head start, leading to grief in Europe like the linked article. But... this wasn't really resolvable. If it wasn't the EU it would have been someone else unexpectedly behind. No one's going to be happy until we're all vaccinated.

There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate.

And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

If the vaccines were developed publicly there might not be any vaccines. This is not your ordinary flu shot.

About a quarter of the long list of vaccines was developed by public universities. Almost all were developed with billions in public subsidies.

mRNA vaccines are not your average vaccine.

Where are the publicly developed ones used and how much does it cost per vaccinated person, and what is the effectiveness and safety? One would expect to see these in EU, but I see only these from US companies around here.

I never said a thing against public funding. That is not the same thing as developed publicly.

Thinking you can just go and develop a mRNA vaccine sounds like Dunning-Kruger to me. It took decades of research done by highly paid, highly specialized people highly driven towards a business goal and thus profit. I am not aware of any public entity doing that kind of research and actually successfully applying it too. (Yes, the development stands on the shoulders of public basic research. Not the same thing.)

Public investment in the EU doesn't work like in the US. Expect to see a shit ton of money trickle down to Eurocrats and bureaucrats in their respective countries, before one ounce reach one country.

Another issue is the fragmentation of the EU. If there is a pool of funds for a particular research target, the EU has to divvy it between its major countries. So even if a university in country X doesn't have much of a history researching something, they still get funded from the EU pool, as long as their country raises a tantrum over it.

Meanwhile the US' (and most other countries') policy often looks at funding individual projects to one or a few unis at most. More targeted funding = better outputs.

Not that EU doesn't have its successes. Galileo could be called a success, but the road to it was very very bumpy.

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly.

Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place.

In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can make the vaccine. That would be extremely hardcore measure to use, but in current situation, definitely possible.

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

That's just one vaccine, there are half a dozen that have resulted in usable products, and many, many more that didn't pan out.

That's what many people are getting mad about.

Germany wanted to order from Biontech in July 2020 but the EU convinced them to let the EU order for a better "collective bargaining position". But this isn't the time to bargain. Just pay them a few billion Euros. Germany alone is estimated to be currently subsidizing its shut-down economy with around 4 billion Euros a week. Each week is more expensive than what the EU was willing to pay for advanced orders: 2.7 billion.

This was not the EU pushing, rather the smaller countries were scared that they'd be left out and thus put pressure on the German government to agree to do it jointly.

That said, the main source for the story tha the negotiations were advanced is the German health minister who has skin in the game and reason to try and assign the blame elsewhere...

It was the EU pushing for the Commission to negotiate even though it was clear the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance (IVA) composed of the four countries were planning to supply all member states. There are multiple sources on this deal including the official AZ press release, although the harsher criticism of the Commission's role is from Spahn as you say.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccin...

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/europe-s-vaccine...

Just paying more to get further in the queue is not a good solution. That's just a zero sum game.

What is better is removing all obstacles from the vaccine mass production scaling.

Oxford A/Z vaccine was developed at Oxford university and AZ joined later to manufacture it (after UK gov intervened, Oxford team was originally in talks with US Merck). This article [1] has back story.

EU paid millions to pharma companies (€1.78bn), that's true. However UK paid more than that(€1.9bn) and US invested even more €9bn.[1] I personally do not understand why EU bargained to start with and why it did not invest more, when damages are much bigger.

I do not think EU can break any patent, they do not own it. "Vaccitech owns intellectual property used in the Oxford vaccine's development" [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/29/we-had-to-go...

[2] https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-professor-oxford-vac...

The "at cost" thing comes from the IP agreement between the University of Oxford and AZ. The EU has nothing to do with it.

Then, knowing EU, we would be rolling out the first vaccines in 2022 or later.

Sanofi is going to produce the Pfizer vaccine too, it was reported by Bloomberg a couple days back.

EDIT: found a CNBC article https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/26/sanofi-to-produce-100-millio...

BioNTech's vaccine, not pfizer. Pfizer is just the distributer.

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