Comment by w10-1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w10-1 | Hacker News Reader

This is an historic achievement with huge benefits, particularly for Africa.

AFAIK, Gilead hasn't detailed any commitment to making it available to all who need it. There's been talk of $4K -$42K yearly price. Gilead just this month is promising regulatory submissions for approvals soon. The drugs sounds quite complicated and hence difficult to manufacture, perhaps making it an enduring franchise.

The original post is raising a most interesting question: in a world where preventing infection is possible, what's the standard or incentive for a vaccine? It's rare to get 100% prevention from a vaccine. The incentive would seem to depend only on cost, and any vaccine developer would know that Gilead can likely lower cost at will, making it impossible to recoup vaccine development costs.

A lot of health care problems are undermined by the profit motive angle.

I don't know how to solve that because there's no such thing as a free lunch and the people developing solutions deserve to be paid.

But Africa is extremely poor and the rest of the world suffers the consequences when we can't be arsed to make their problems solvable at a price point they can afford.

It will be virtually non-existent in Africa if it is priced like that.

It will be non existent in Africa until India starts making the generics. That’s how it has historically been for most prescription medication there.

>The incentive would seem to depend only on cost, and any vaccine developer would know that Gilead can likely lower cost at will, making it impossible to recoup vaccine development costs.

This is a good argument that some drugs should be developed by state grants or bounties and the patent is in the state. Something similar delivered covid vaccines in record time - in the form of massive pre purchase agreements.

Vaccines could be cool to give to entire populations, or for really poor or hard to reach places, doing a one and done approach. It could be part of kids’ shot regiment that they don’t even think about, like the hpv vaccine now.

Then for moderate and high risk people they could do the twice yearly shot once it becomes relevant.

I’m no expert in this field at all, just doing my armchair analysis here.

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