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Comment by bpavuk | Hacker News Reader

> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free

centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.

the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.

China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is

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> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.

So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?

It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.

This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.

[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...

US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization. They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system. The costs for the producers aren't really a factor.

> US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization.

Of course we do. A lot of the foundational research happens at universities, funded with taxpayer money in the form of research grants.

> They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system.

Only partially. The pharma companies roughly know how much it cost them to get the compound past all the trial stages and how many compounds failed along the path. The usual method is that the rich nations pay for R&D amortization and poor countries pay at-cost for manufacture.

Nearly every convenience of modern civilization is funded with taxpayer money, so that reasoning is without merit.

Yeah, but usually, we pay for stuff with taxes and we benefit.

I wouldn't have much of a problem if China and India would just steal our stuff to benefit their own population - given the widespread poverty there, that's development aid.

But where I draw the line is when China and India undermine our own markets with copycats.

So we should instead pay so that some companies can do huge profits?

Guess why I wrote in my original post that the entire system needs a drastic reform.

What is fundamentally unsustainable is the positive feedback loop of maintaining secrecy or exclusivity on information.

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