Comment by kayone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayone | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine was one of the primary researcher working on the vaccine in the Winnipeg lab. I remember going out to dinners past few years and keep hearing about him his work on this vaccine. One thing that really bothered me was how the government handled it at the end and how the vaccine was handed to NewLink (Which latter licensed it to Merc) for pretty much nothing.

From what I remember, a year or so before the outbreak and just after the development of the vaccine was pretty much done Health Canada decides that there will be no money in an ebola vaccine since they didn't foresee an outbreak and even if it did happen it would be in a third world country with not much money to go around.

So they put a warp on it and hand it to NewLink for $200,000. Apparently there were emails going around between the lab and the government trying to convince them that this is a shitty deal, but the end response was 200K is the most we'll ever get out of this.

a year later, the biggest outbreak in the history and NewLink licenses the Vaccine to Merck for $50M USD.

My main issue with it isn't that the vaccine was gone for $200K vs $50M, if you have spent god know how many millions and how many years developing a vaccine as part of government program, don't let it go for 200K, are we as a nation really hurting that much to have to recover that 200K? I just can't make any sense of it. and if you were thinking they sold it so it could be mass produced and developed then you are mistaken since NewLink did exactly nothing with it until they licensed it to Merck.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine-develop...

How many other small bets did NewLink place on promising technologies coming out of academic labs, and how many of them panned out? Put another way, was 200k a fair market rate for the license at the time they paid it, or do you have reason to suspect corruption or malfeasance?

How could you not assume corruption? This is Ebola we're talking about. It wasn't "if" it was "when".

>This is Ebola we're talking about. It wasn't "if" it was "when"

Before 2014, there had been no outbreaks that had infected more than a few hundred people. ( www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/history/chronology.html )

> How could you not assume corruption? Even after the large 2014 outbreak, Merck claims that they do not view the development of the vaccine as "a commercial opportunity", but rather as being good for PR and for employee retention. ( http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/31/will-merck-ebola-vaccine-make... )

Is the only evidence of corruption the small initial licensing fee? If so, note that the terms of the license to NewLink also include royalties due to the Canadian government in the case of successful commercialization ( http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1126234/0001047469110... ).

What hit me most today after is saw the news. For many years ebola killed people and only after it hit mainstream media and it could have been an potential threat to the western world. Money just magical appears and we have a vaccine in less than a year.

Pardon the cynicism if I say that this is how nature works. How often is that only threats make things move ?

I believe the commenters concern is that threats to african lives aren't viewed as significant threats, only threats to western lives.

More generally, policymakers tend to be concerned about their constituents and taxpayers over those who are neither.

Arguably, that's the who point of a representative democracy.

Threats to those with means, but anyway, we're led to believe this should not happen in medicine, a life is a life. It's all very sad anyway.

I expect that's the specific reason "The Hot Zone" and "The Coming Plague" name the victims.

That is, rather than "An African man had Ebola" they would say "Arthur Obama had Ebola".

There's a whole world of difference between the two.

Much social, political and technological progress happens because something/people instigated those with power into believing they might be inconvenienced or harmed.

Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s. There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)

It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.

I think you misinterpreted the comment you're responding to.

No, I didn't. The scare of an epidemic in the U.S. has been real for decades.

This sort of snide comment has been made before. In fact, in the "malaria thread" just a few days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354

Ma8ee wrote: "Considering the nature of market economies and how the wealth is distributed in the world, it is not particularly surprising that most most medical research is aiming to cure ailments that affect white western men."

In this case this wasn't true, since the vaccine was done and sold before the outbreak.

Vaccines (like everything else in medicine) cost an awful lot to research and test. Somehow somebody's got to pay for that. Many vaccines aren't 100% effective, and add to that the fact that there are a variety of people who can't get vaccinated because they're too young, too old, too sick, or otherwise. When I get my vaccinations, I'm doing my part to protect everyone else. To me, the crucial issue is that vaccines are done for the common good anyways, but we make individuals pay for their own vaccinations. Even if the vaccines are developed by private entities, they should be purchased by governments or coalitions of governments for free-as-in-beer distribution.

This government has had a bad history of not listening to scientists. Specifically, the long-form census, the fresh water lakes project, the muzzling of scientists...

Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions. There was no ebola outbreak at the time the government (and by that, I mean the bureaucracy) was finding a buyer.

it's not about the scientist overestimating the value of their inventions, when you pour in years and millions of dollars on research like this you just don't give it away for pretty much nothing. 200K _might_ be considerable amount in personal finance, but when you enter the world of governments and research it's basically a rounding error. 200K? you might've as well given it away for free. When a bureaucrat sells something like this for so cheap all it tells me is they just wanted to pad a cell in one of their spreadsheet quarter of a percent with no regards on the investment and effort that was put into the project.

Giving it away for nothing would be fine -- put it in the public domain for anyone to use how they can. But selling a monopoly right for $200K? That's stealing from the taxpayers -- and Merck.

Putting it in the public domain sounds great, but someone needs to conduct the human trials needed to make it safe and effective. They aren't cheap and producing a vaccine carries huge liability risks.

Someone like... the government that already spent millions developing it?

and how do governments get their money?

Your thinking soundes like an example of the "sunk costs" fallacy.

It doesn't really matter what you invested. All that matters is what someone will pay for it.

But if someone will only pay you a pittance for it, why not hang onto it?

They have poor judgement for being right? Huh?

Survivorship bias. Look at the research into the abysmal rate of technology transfer from universities into industry.

> Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions.

Possibly. Or maybe they thought that for a government-funded vaccine that might save thousands of lives, maximizing availability was more important than maximizing economic value for a completely unrelated company. Because they weren't, y'know, sociopaths.

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