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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

>The problem is that if you are being attacked, you will gladly allow people to make big profit if they save lives.

Reminds me of the covid pandemic. Pfizer made $100 billion last year

Pfizer was making on average $50b revenue [1] before COVID.

And the profits they generated by COVID could well save countless more lives given that their MRNA technology is successfully being applied to other use cases.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PFE/pfizer/revenue

COVID vaccines are estimated to have saved 20 M lives world wide. In the US, the statistical value of a human life is $9 M, so (extending that to the global population, which is perhaps problematic) the value is $180 T. Making a measly $50 B is chump change in comparison.

Are the people who were saved by COVID vaccines never going to die from any other cause? I believe the $9M figure is actually just a reference to what the FAA considers a reasonable threshold for imposing a new expense on aircraft manufacturers and airlines in order to make flying safer?

So, saving a life has no value unless the person was already otherwise immortal?

Ridiculous.

No that isn't what I said, and yes it would be just as ridiculous as attributing the same value to preventing a 90 year old nursing home patient from dying of an endemic respiratory virus as we do to preventing deaths in plane crashes.

That's going to alter the number by less than an order of magnitude. The benefit still is massively larger than the cost.

Can you link me to a study which does a reasonable job of attempting to come up with a "Covid deaths prevented by vaccines number" while taking into account the effects of increased seroprevalence, decreased virulence of the virus itself, and the "no more dry tinder" effect?

The 20M figure was from an estimate in Lancet Infectious Diseases. It was for the first year, not the entire pandemic.

https://archive.ph/R5K3r

Typically the way it is done is by calculating how many years of healthy life you saved

Which would, of course, bring the “money saved by vaccines” number down a bit.

On the other hand, if we were able to factor in the benefit of milder cases and less long COVID/other side effects, I guess the number would go up a bit.

I suspect it is just too complicated for us to work out here.

Where did that 9 million come from? Pls

The value is something the US Transportation Admin. has calculated [0]. It's rather cold-blooded, but it makes sense.

[0] https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

It seems a bit excessive, but if you assume someone working from 25 to 65, that is 40 years, at $50k per year then they're "worth" >= $2M to the economy. Really more than that because they will do some things for free to other people, such as family members. So it is probably at the right order of magnitude.

By your logic there would be nothing wrong in charging $100 or more for an insulin injection.

Instead https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...

The problem with insulin, at least in the US, has been elaborations (still under patent protection) on it that are slightly better than the old versions. But doctors have to prescribe the best treatment. There's no quality/cost tradeoff.

Thats a massive difference in absolute and relative terms. $50B and 100%

The agreement was $20 a vaccine, which IMO is perfectly fine. Making a profit from doing a necessary thing is very capitalism. Remember that shareholders were very upset they didn't make MORE profit.

Canada paid $175 per dose.

https://www.oxfam.ca/news/vaccine-monopolies-make-cost-of-va...

That's likely the price executives and shareholders would have wanted for the US. I wonder what leverage Trump held over Pfizer to get the $20 price. It's a genuine negotiating win from someone who considers just not paying your contractors to be good business and negotiating.

Pfizer also got billions of dollars in free and taxpayer-funded advertising

Taxpayers got billions in life-saving government information, too. It wasn't for the benefit of Pfizer that the government ran those campaigns.

They also saved millions of lives.

And caused many unnecessary deaths by witholding the vaccine from less rich countries that couldn't outcompete richer ones, since the supply was very limited in the moments of most need.

If they really wanted to save lives they should have liberalized the vaccine's production, but all they cared for was profit, the life saving just a coincidence.

Eh, it's not like you people would share SinoVac, even if it worked properly.

> it's not like you people would share SinoVac

Patently false[0]. Then yes, Chinese vaccines might have been less effective but it was still an obvious choice when the alternative was nothing.

By the way, what do you mean by "you people"?? I'm European and your statement makes me think you have a fragile ego and a typical USamerican superiority complex.

.0: https://archive.is/Ir6qt

Your other comments mention living in China, and you also deny Uighur genocide, so thinking you're pro-CCP is not exactly a stretch, is it?

CCP could buy Western vaccines, but they instead chose their own, even when they knew it is less effective, because their people's lives were less important to them than their ego.

> you also deny Uighur genocide

It's *Uyghur. At least learn their name if you pretend to know everything about their alleged genocide. Do some unbiased research and you will come to the same conclusion.

> thinking you're pro-CCP is not exactly a stretch

It's CPC but yes.

> CCP could buy Western vaccines

Sure, the supply wasn't enough for Europe alone and you think China could have vaccinated 1 billion quickly using western vaccines?

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