Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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Solving COVID: Pfizer starts research in January 2020. Apparently they avoided Operation Warp Speed because they were worried about the government slowing them down [0]. We get a successful mRNA vaccine for I think the first time in history? Takes a few days, they've been preparing for this sort of scenario for years.

Estimated cost, $1 billion. The only thing slowing them down is legislation - they want to make money by resolving people's medical issues with novel techniques.

Solving Long COVID: NIH $1 billion. Nothing. Probably the biggest problem here is that groups like Pfizer are being banned from doing research by an NIH ethics committee that says trading 1 life to save 1,000 is an unacceptable trade.

Now I'm not against the NIH spending $1 billion on research. Better than feeding it into the military-industrial complex for example. But the evidence here is if you want a research team to fix a known problem, the people who know how work at Pfizer not the NIH. Now Pfizer probably can't do that trick of getting results on demand, but there'll be some company that can - assuming it is possible. There are a lot of companies so there are lots of attempts being made.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer-BioNTech_COVID-19_vacci...

Biontech pioneered the mRNA technique and they were sponsored by German taxpayers; and Pfizer was promised by Operation Warpspeed that US taxpayers would purchase 100 million doses of any potential working vaccine before it was even developed, that must have felt motivating. There was no vaccines developed entirely through private funding even though the profits were entirely privatized, ie Moderna received about a billion in development aid and AstraZeneca somehow managed to pocket research out of Oxford University.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech tells me BioNTech was founded in 2008 based on research by Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, and Christoph Huber, with a seed investment of €150 million from MIG Capital and AT Impf.

I don't know much about Germany I must admit. Is AT Impf some sort of government body? Because this looks a lot like private actors spotting a good thing well in advance.

I'm sure they took government money at some point because the government is handing out money and why not. It'd be silly to turn it down. But there are obviously millions of dollars here to develop influenza vaccines and we see the payoff was billions of dollars. The Free market could do this with no intervention - the payoffs look pretty good.

> In September 2019, BioNTech received a capital contribution of US$55 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the option of doubling that investment amount at a later date.

Heh, there they are.

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> ...US taxpayers would purchase 100 million doses...

Yeah but the 100 million doses purchase would have encouraged them to build infrastructure, which we already know the private sector is better at than the public sector at. Operation Warp speed wouldn't have hurt, but again they technically had the vaccine developed before Operation Warp Speed was a thing.

The only thing stopping people buying the vaccine in mid-2020 was that the government had made it illegal.

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