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Comment by ipspam | Hacker News Reader

$60 billion for two years worth of shots? Sounds like a steal. Covid has cost the global economy Trillions and Trillions of dollars already, and all the downstream costs will probably add up to $100 trillion real dollars when factoring in inflation, money printing, national debt, state/provincial debts/local debts/consumer debt increases.

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The costs of the pandemic are one side. The other is the cost of developing and producing the vaccines. In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here. The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper. After all, large sums of money have already been invested by the states for research and development. The question is what the contracts and conditions were for these investments. But if the manufacturers had hardly any costs and risks during development and are now allowed to hold the rights to the patents and make large profits with the vaccines, then in my opinion something has gone wrong. However, I don't know if that is actually the case here.

> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here.

Isn't it exactly the situation here?

I mean, a few months ago we even had central governments bid against their own local governments to have access to vaccines. Doesn't that lay out quite clearly that this is a demand-driven market?

The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return, so I just hope they have negotiated other terms to get the vaccines at fair prices.

> The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return (...)

I don't believe this is a fair or accurate description of what really happens.

Countries invest in education and free and open research, countries invest in entrepreneurship and in people launching startups, and countries invest in partnerships between their public research and private companies to foster the creation of added-value products and services.

And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.

Furthermore, your comment has nothing at all to do with markets. You're trying to pin onto the "market" tag one of the most basic characteristics of social democratic societies, where the state invests in infrastructure and in lowering or eliminating barriers to entry in business.

> And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.

Every company needs to do that. If a government invests in a company then maybe they should also pay a HIGHER tax rate?

The initial thesis was that governments get nothing in return from their investment in education and research. This is patently false. Companies pay taxes, and the higher income they make, the more taxes they pay.

You may argue that over 20% in income tax is not enough, but in the case of BioNTech and Pfizer, you're arguing between two scenarios: seeing the states get about 20% from the profit extracted from billions in revenue, or getting zero due to the absence of any investment in education and basic research and supporting research projects.

Getting paid a 20% chunk of a multi-billion euro revenue is not small change, and this also ignores the fact that this prior investment in education and research shared with startups, which mind you supported the bulk of the development cost of these vaccines and thus enabled humanity to have vaccines with such a low turn-around time, was what ultimately allowed the world to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. How valuable is that?

Not to mention the externalities in fostering the creation of industries and high-value tech jobs.

Vaccine manufacturers are making $20-25/dose in revenue, not profit.

The price for vaccines currently being charged is absurdly reasonable. I would pay 10x the price out of pocket without a second thought, and I wouldn't care how much of that is profit for the manufacturer.

Around $20 for the incredibly new mrna based vaccines. Other versions, like oxford-astrazeneca, are single digit USD per dose. As I recall ISI has set a price ceiling of about $4/dose there.

These vaccines are so stupidly cheap and cost effective that the priority is, has been, and will be simply manufacturing and distributing enough.

> The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper.

The answer to this is emphatically no.

Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...

> there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses.

Because US and Europe can pay that much more the Big Pharma is going to make the 3rd, 4th,... booster shots instead of trying to satisfy that low-income countries demand. And making new vaccine against delta seems also less profitable than just pushing the booster shots. Immunity falling in 6 months - sounds like a situation somewhat between subscription model and 12 hours Vicodin, you can be sure that the MBAs know how to exploit it.

What happens around covid is well outside just the supposed medical issue of pandemic fighting. If anything it is seems to be primarily about business and politics. For example US officially pressured Brazil to not take Russian vaccine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/16/hhs-brazil-s... .

> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand.

Indeed supply is severely limited (esp. Outside rich countries, but even inside rich countries if you go back a few months) and demand is extreme.

If this was a free market situation, pfizer would have much much more money.

A good example is Singapore. Total direct costs of support for business and individuals? $60B from what I’ve seen. And that does not include the economic costs of shutting down the economy.

Cost to vaccinate everyone in the country? ~$250-500M for the vaccines alone.

The vaccines are an absolute steal at their current price..

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