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Comment by ajays | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic news. However, the vaccine won't be in production and available till 2015. Nearly 1 million people die every year from it; which means, about 1.5 million lives could be saved if the vaccine were in production today. I know it can't happen overnight, but still: 4 years?

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Surely the counter argument is that a badly tested vaccine could have very bad consequences.

They're reporting the results of a Phase III trial. You don't get past Phase I without proving safety.

Large-scale production will take a while, and they might be trying to make it even more effective. The article mentioned it halves the risk of malaria in African children, which is huge, but this progress could perhaps be taken even further.

It says "by 2015". If they mean it, that's more like 3 years. These kinds of reviews move at a snail's pace.

Worse, I wouldn't even be sure they can economically mass-produce it yet, and the ramp-up could be a major PITA. The final trial was 16,000 vaccines, the WHO says there are 250 million cases every year. They're going to need tens of millions of doses before a blip even registers. And somebody's gonna have to distribute and administer this stuff.

Not as much profit in this as in little blue pills, so it simply won't be a priority for big pharma, unfortunately.

Really? I'm bet it has to do with further testing. You could give a little bit of credit to GlaxoSmithKline for working on this for 24 years. This isn't exactly a good example of "big pharma" greed.

If it was indeed made by GlaxoSmithKline, then this is a good example of "big pharma" greed. Only, in this case, "big pharma" greed might end up saving millions of lives.

That all depends on the price. If the price is reasonable then fine. But typically big pharma that gets a lock-in on 'life' is anything but reasonable in their pricing, after all, what's the value of a human life.

The 5% profits over costs is promising, even if it leaves some wiggle room.

However awesome the result, they're not in it out of charity. They will want a return on those 24 years of investment.

I've seen the Moving Goalposts enough in the past. You're probably one of the ones who argued that Big Pharma would never allow the discovering of a vaccine because vaccines aren't profitable enough. Today must not have been a good day for you.

October is Vaccine Damage Awareness Month. If Big Pharma is doing this, it must be because it will cause Vaccine Damage.

(No, I'm not a nutcase, but, yes, this really is Vaccine Damage Awareness Month. 'Tis the season to kill people by demonizing an extremely safe form of preventative treatment by spreading baseless rumors to sow irrational fear.)

@cjy, you might be right. We should give them credit for this. I'm just pretty cynical when it comes to the pharma industry.

Wait, are you implying big pharma doesn't make saving lives a priority? I wonder if presidential candidates know this.

They've mentioned that their goal is to make 5% profit above the cost. Even at 20%, it seems reasonable for something that took about 24 years to create. Hopefully they'll stick by their word.

Let's hope they start with the actual costs of manufacturing, and not tack on 24 years of research and the cost of large scale clinical trials.

GSK has a mixed history when it comes to stuff like this, let's hope they do the right thing here. I note they didn't say the doses will cost at most 'x' (which they should have a pretty good idea of by now).

why would you not tack on 24 years of research and the cost or large scale clinical trials?

if GSK didn't pay for those, the malaria vaccine wouldn't exist; those are real costs that GSK paid. if they were always compensated on certain drugs only based on cost of manufacturing, they would simply never research those drugs.

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