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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

Forcing vaccine manufacturers to give away their vaccine creates strong incentives against inventing vaccines.

It works once, but the next pandemic may happen without any vaccines.

The consensual, win-win way is to buy vaccines from the manufacturers, at high prices. This makes manufacturers wealthy by making people healthy and aligns incentives for the common good.

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Or just have government funded researchers that are well compensated, it's not the actual scientist that developed the drugs getting rich.

First, the science in developing a vaccine is not the only work involved. Clinical trials and scaling up manufacturing to name a few.

Second, it actually is the scientists getting rich at least in some cases: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...

Here is a profile of the billionaire inventors of the Pfizer vaccine as a counterexample:

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-billionaire-couple-is-behi...

I was going to say the the same thing, just have both, well educated, funded scientists working for the Government (funded but still independent) and private companies competing with them too.

Huh? The Moderna employees have made out very well based on equity appreciation. And Pfizer scientists are well compensated including stock.

That’s a straw man argument. They’ve made billions and will make billions more. Nothing is being given away for free. But currently, it is in their financial interests for this pandemic to go on indefinitely with continued mutations and a never-ending need for boosters. And our free market always seems to tilt in favor of monopolies. Shut down small businesses but don’t put any pressure on big pharma. Similar to 2008, let average people suffer but prop up the banks. I believe in free markets, but there is a reason people are turning against capitalism. No markets are truly free and we need consistent values applied to players big and small. Helping the world get vaccinated is the morally right thing to do, not optimizing pharma profits for the next decade under the guise of “incentives.”

Please forgive my personal pet peeve, but nothing BurningFrog said was a straw man as far as i can tell. I don't see any way they misrepresented your argument.

“Giving away their vaccine” is the straw man. There is a huge range between free and maximum profits. I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be incentivized with a profit, the question is how much and what's in the best interest of the American people, not just Pfizer and Moderna.

Do you think the ~$20/dose Pfizer and Moderna are charging is unreasonable?

For poor people in India or Africa - yes.

At $20/dose you can vaccinate all of humanity twice for $300B. An incredible bargain.

The US government has spent $5300B in pandemic relief packages. Vaccinating the planet could have been a cheap PR win barely noticed among that.

Except there just isn't production capacity for that on the planet.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/heres-everything-congress-...

> Except there just isn't production capacity for that on the planet.

But it's not like we're fully utilizing the available production capacity.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/do...

I was responding to this, written by someone else:

> force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world

This reads like a copy/paste of the usual comments on HN about big tech, but almost none of it actually applies to most vaccine manufacturers.

Government could have easily forced a reasonable license where the original manufacturer gets paid per shot but is not in a position to limit availability. They are not the only ones able to manufacture these vaccines.

For the mRNA vaccines, I think they actually are.

Only experimental batches had ever been made before, and then they had to invent ways to make billions of doses.

So does that mean they would have not done anything unless they got paid? They would have just let people die? This is one of the many factors that doesn't add up when telling people they have a civic duty, yet the large corporations can't be held accountable and also make a huge profit.

There are some less than amazing ideologies present in the US. Property and money are valued above human life by many.

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