But, this...
"In a congressional hearing in March, Sanders highlighted that Moderna created its vaccine in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and received $1.7 billion in federal grant money for clinical development."
sort of changes things.
The solution? I am not sure.
If the money came with strings, maybe the US government would have a little more money and Moderna stock holders a little less, or maybe we wouldn't have a Moderna. And the upside of the former is so smaller compared to the downside of the latter I think in this case we made the right choice.
How profitable do we want to make pandemic preparedness? I think we should make it wildly profitable.
The first would be for the government to behave like a normal investor: Give money for stock or give a loan instead of writing blank cheques.
The blank cheque at least could have disallowed any sort of patents. This is quite ridiculous: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vac...
Wouldn't that distort the competitive landscape for the other participants, though?
If I were running a business where one of the main customers was the government, shouldn't I be lobbying for the government to take a stake in me, and me only?
Now, I guess those people are anticipating maybe future profits to be made from NIH funds... but that's sort of the point of government grants to private enterprise. In return for putting their capital up to fund labs and equipment and research, investors expect to be compensated... and some of that compensation comes in the form of government contracts to produce lifesaving vaccines.