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Comment by callmeal | Hacker News Reader

> How would vaccines and new drugs be invented without any profit incentive?

The same way they were invented before.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6351694/

    An interviewer once inquired about the ownership of the polio vaccine patent, to which Salk famously answered, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

https://www.t1international.com/100years/

    On January 23rd, 1923 Banting, Best, and Collip were awarded the American patents for insulin. They sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each. Banting notably said: “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” His desire was for everyone who needed access to it to have it.

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Individuals often respond to social status incentives more than cash. Undoubtedly this invention helped Salk's financial and personal outlook in other ways.

Also the models of development of these is just completely different from what modern medicines often requires. Specifically, operateing large research labs (which are heavily regulated) and then pursuing the marathon that is FDA approval. Individuals will still tinker, but those industrial scale developments are not going to happen without funding.

I dunno, the reason that we have such long patent periods is supposedly to pay for all the losses in Phase 1/2/3. However, if we merely let scientists do clinical research, as per usual, and license the right to conduct these studies to contract research labs, and then license the production rights for the successful trials to contract manufacturers, we could probably cut out a huge amount of the waste and marketing spend by Pfizer/Novartis et al and still achieve the better goals.

In fact, because the people in this chain would be less incentivised to focus on diseases of rich people, then humanity might overall be better off.

> Individuals often respond to social status incentives more than cash

Incentives matter. But they are not the whole story.

People act for reasons other than incentives, also.

Modern vaccines and new drugs are vastly more expensive. It costs for example over $1 billion to fund a new drug.

Yeah, but does it have to be?

Like, definitely there's costs associated with Phase 1/2/3 etc, but right now the actors in the chain have absolutely no incentives to limit these costs, as they help to justify the huge profits gained from the temporary monopoly of patents.

Also, it's worth noting that all the big Pharma companies spend much, much more on marketing than they do on research.

> Yeah, but does it have to be?

No. Definitely not.

We learnt that during the mad scramble for a Covid vaccine.

Followed up by a sickening cash grab.

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