>We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers.
Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low.
So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost.
When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down.
Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Semglee, a biosimilar form of insulin."
"As a generic, it can be automatically swapped for the price brand-name versions to help patients save money."
https://www.verywellhealth.com/fda-allows-generic-swap-for-b...
I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
Of course there is. The government would have paid a company a whole bunch of money to do it, for COVID.
There needs to be a mechanism to profit from the R&D. Point blank. It doesn't have to be through patents... We can create a new system if a better one is devised. But fundamentally, nobody will invest billions of dollars into a venture that is guaranteed not to be profitable.
The alternative is fully public funded research.
So then you agree with me completely that these companies would have existed and would have researched the covid vaccine, because literally as I just said before, the government offered a bunch of money for it, which is "public funded research".
Glad you agree with me entirely, but I guess also just wanted to restate my argument slightly, for no reason.
The government would be willing to fund a vaccine, but there would be no capability to create it.
What is difficult to understand about that?
Do you think we could create a new vaccine within a year if there were no companies with multi billion dollar R&D teams?
Could we build iOS or Android if there were no software developers?
I very clearly laid out why, even if there were a will to publicly finance a covid vaccine, the capabilities to do so wouldn't exist in a world where pharmaceutical companies couldn't profit from R&D. You can't finance towards an outcome if you have no structural capability to reach it.
You know, the last few hundred years biotech companies have spent developing the capacity, know how, ability to invent new drugs and vaccines? All of which was supported by a patent system allowing them to profit from their creations.
What part of that is difficult to understand? Do I need to make it clearer somehow? Is it too challenging to understand the nuance of structural capability vs financing something in the moment?
Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame.
If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding.
There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era.
What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments.
However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech.
Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation