This is why vaccine development and pharmaceuticals in general should be a public good, owned by the public sector, priced as a public good.
* Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research ‘was 97% publicly funded’: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...
* (US Specific) Most New Molecular Entities (NME) approved by the FDA are derived from public research (I dont know exact numbers)
I would also suggest that 'owned by public sector' does not mean 'public good'.
Even when a private corporation influenced/directed/controlled by federal authorities -- it is problematic.
I do not know of a political system that can effectively check federal government so that it stays for public good.
Money-sponsored or various threatened-by-force election models are not effective at checking that premise.
Gotta be "good" to be a "public good."
Many of us (me included for most of my life, hell maybe I’m doing it now), tend to over extrapolate how much our own experience is the experience everywhere and that what we see must be fitting some logical rule or trend. Reality is annoyingly more complex than we like.
I believe you're misreading GP's comment and playing on words. "owned by public sector" doesn't have to mean "being run by people elected through general elections". You seem to refer to federal government so probably you're referring to US government and how your opinion is that it is inherently bad. That's another debate i don't have anything to say on (not US myself) and i believe you have a bigger problem if you don't trust your government. Now tons of "public sector" enterprises can well enough be run in relatively closed loop. The solution is quite easy: have dedicated taxes for dedicated such enterprises, instead of all the taxes going into a general budget at the hand of general politics. This is how public healthcare, pension or stuff like water used to work in eg france, before it started to get teared into pieces. They are self-funded basically by people paying for the service, but since we have realized basically everyone needs it, paying is mandatory, and the amount you pay is proportional to your salary: the so-called salary-contributions and company-contributions.
Good god no. One of the benefits of the Twitter-Musk saga is that it proved that the feds really were meddling quite a bit with social media companies requesting censorship. You want to give them the keys entirely?
And of course, it's at least possible that their costs to keep vaccines available are higher when people aren't really getting them (US booster uptake is pretty middling, even among older people that get even more benefit out of them).
The Covid vaccines were developed and deployed by private industry.
It would be nice to see a similar analysis for Moderna's vaccine, but of course the companies like to keep their cards close to their chest.
The 97% figure from the study is for research and development. As for manufacturing, they would recoup that from selling the vaccine at/slightly above manufacturing cost. As the article I linked states, they didn't like that deal.
And the next time they come out with some drug or vaccine, will we also just assume most of the funds were private, until proven otherwise? Why not assume the opposite, and let them prove they're not fleecing us? Are they so trustworthy and benevolent?
You're a Chinese company that wants to produce vaccines? Estabilsh a factory in the country of origin, obtain a license from the original manufacturer and start producing.
> Since 2006, Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars that BARDA used to develop the scientific infrastructure to produce vaccines in response to the threat of pandemic flu. Thus, the basic research undergirding the COVID-19 vaccines was largely publicly supported.
> Recent estimates indicate that the government spent more than $900 million dollars supporting non-clinical studies and research to accelerate movement of candidate vaccines into clinical trials at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi, Merck, and Moderna.
> Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca together are estimated to have received more than $2.7 billion from the federal government to cover expenses related to human trials. The bulk of money was directed at Phase III trials, which compare new treatments against standard care and where most human test costs are incurred.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20210512....
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-nearly-1b-research...
Yes, they received grants. Yes also that they developed the finished products which were then purchased at a discounted rate and they received Emergency Use Audits and accelerated review processes to put them out there. Pretty much anyone that’s wanted to get their COVID vaccines and boosters has gotten them and they didn’t have to pay out of pocket at the time of injection. J&J, Moderna, Sanofi and AstraZeneca are now free to pursue other opportunities. Why shouldn’t they make a profit?
If there is a credible risk of vaccines not being developed, as you say, perhaps it's time to think about either: a) nationalizing the key players in pharmaceutical industry, or b) introducing laws (if none already exist) that allow governments to compel these companies to allocate resources to work on specific projects.
Vaccines are not a luxury item sold on a free market and we shouldn't have to rely on profit-seeking companies to develop and appropriately distribute them in the most beneficial way, it's simply incompatible with what's best for humanity during a pandemic. We've seen this play out, US & EU countries created massive stockpiles of vaccines because they had dozens of billions of taxpayer money to pay for extortionate prices while poorer countries still had 1% vaccination rates.
This has lead to hundreds of millions (!) of doses of Covid vaccines expiring and being wasted. The side effect of this is increased likelihood of mutations that has the potential to harm everyone.
Endemic. Pandemic implies an end. They also make money off flu vaccines and measles vaccines. What’s the difference? That they can make money at all doing it is why they continue to do so and why governments don’t have to try and figure out supply and demand themselves.
> If there is a credible risk of vaccines not being developed, as you say, perhaps it's time to think about either: a) nationalizing the key players in pharmaceutical industry, or b) introducing laws (if none already exist) that allow governments to compel these companies to allocate resources to work on specific projects.
It’s not just about developing vaccines in the middle of pandemics; it’s about having an incentive to develop every type of vaccine we could possibly need, eventually, finding new applications for vaccine technology and improving the development and manufacturing processes. You need smart people, smart people want money and not just the thanks of their neighbors, ergo profits. Sure the government is a cushy job, but private sector pays more and as long as there’s profits, the “key players” as you call them aren’t limited to the ones that exist today.
> Vaccines are not a luxury item sold on a free market
I don’t know about “luxury” but they are sold on a free market.
> and we shouldn't have to rely on profit-seeking companies to develop and appropriately distribute them in the most beneficial way, it's simply incompatible with what's best for humanity during a pandemic.
The COVID vaccines set a record for research, development and dispersal and those profit seeking corporations pulled that off both because they could and they had an incentive to.
> We've seen this play out, US & EU countries created massive stockpiles of vaccines because they had dozens of billions of taxpayer money to pay for extortionate prices while poorer countries still had 1% vaccination rates.
Would you feel better about the US, UK, EU, and Israel putting themselves at the front of the line as long as they had nationalized their pharmaceuticals companies first?
Amazon is a close second, but they're vertically integrated so that's not really a good comparison.
FedEx and DHL are consistently terrible experiences.