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Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

What a ridiculous frame from Tagesschau and whoever is syndicating this news too.

As a German, I'd have happily paid 50€ or 100x more to receive a vaccination as soon as possible.

And then as a country, I'd be happy to pay that price too as it'd allow me to profit long-term by opening my economy that has been suffering from the crysis.

The EU has messed up vaccinations and now there needs to be consequences. Why do we even allow governments to handle the distribution of such a rare good when we all know they're too incompetent to do so? Markets exist for a reason.

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You've already given them a lot of money. The German government gave BioNtech $445 million dollars in a grant last year alone. It's not unreasonable to be concerned that a small number of pharma companies are trying to generate massive profits when they basically have the entire world hostage.

Last year grant was when the technology was already ready and with initial results - it was to scale up the production.

But the funding of the previous 10 years was 1.5B, from private people who also took way more risk.

From your choice of words one can see that you judge pharma concerns for "generating massive profits" by "taking the world hostage".

But nobody has taken anyone for hostage. You're speculating. And it's a gigantic global health crysis. Nothing bad with pharma solving covid.

Nothing bad with pharma solving covid, but surely something bad with pharma solving covid using public money and then not releasing the solution to the public without taking another big fee. (Hypothetically — I’m not saying that’s what happened since I know so little. I’m pointing out a scenario in which pharma would be bad.)

And, I would suggest more broadly that profit doesn’t equate with “morally good”. One could argue that under utilitarianism, the ethically “right” thing to do is to give away vaccines, or at least charge only the manufacturing price. Hell, even a dollar per vaccine across even 50% of the world’s population is a ton of money.

Your type of reasoning is the exact problem that we have in politics.

Single people think they know better than this genius swarm intelligence that is the market. And then they make stupid rules for everyone.

It doesn't matter what is good or bad. Right or wrong. Only the outcome matters. And arguably given the content of the original post, the outcome right now with politics is bad.

Markets don't just magically work better.

Have a look at the harm that fossil fuels can do simply because the costs of these damages were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels.

Unexpected costs of fossil fuels that cause climate change is a historical failure of regulation (politics) and not markets.

Markets are not magic. They're just a tool.

In this case I do not understand what you are arguing for (or against).

"Markets" themselves are the easy part. Regulating them properly is the really difficult part.

Sure, in an ideal world.

The truth is pharma companies had them over a barrel and took advantage of it. For all these years scientists were alerting politicians and the public in general the risk of a pandemic was very real and demanded more attention and resources but were not heard, and now that it came to pass countries do not have any other choice but to pay twice; for the development and for the product.

So sure, in an ideal world, with a population that respected science and not belittled scientists, better prepared countries would have had the advantage to negotiate better pricing because they would have been expecting it. Sadly we do not live in that world.

That's $6 a person.

The consumer surplus on vaccines is so incredibly large that it's all just a silly discussion. Pfizer making $40 of profit (or whatever) on a vaccine worth thousands of dollars just isn't interesting.

Higher prices make it harder for lower income countries, but you are claiming it's offensive that they would capture any of the value of the product, even in places where the 'high' price is not an issue.

Turns out Biontech had good reasons to claim 50EUR per dose: https://m.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/biontech-we...

That's the point of the system, to give the vaccines to the people who run the biggest risks (elderly, healthcare workers who spend a lot of time in proximity to infected, etc), rather than to whoever's the richest. Especially considering that being rich already makes it a lot easier to minimize your risks (typically have jobs that are easier to take home, better access to private transportation, can afford to not work for a while in the worst case).

It's false to assume that only rich people get the vaccine when markets regulate. There's economies of scale that will help lowering production cost.

Edit: Also, let's not kid ourselves here. Anyone that is a billionaire can surely get vacinated already easily.

So, during a critical situation, you authorize business to sell their vaccines at an inflated price.

In this case, i don't understand the rage when the USA was selling Epipen at 1000$.

Now I concur that letting Ursula von der Leyen convey this important decision with a veil of secrecy on the contract was not the best idea.

In a competitive market a price of 1000$ per Epipen would not exist.

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