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Comment by cauefcr | Hacker News Reader

I hope people realize the problem with having a market for medical innovation, backed by patents and copyright as the way of financing medicine, this level of price gouging and capitalization on human suffering can only exist with the current IP laws, and we see a great reduction of price in countries that break those patents and allow for pharmaceutical manufacturers to produce medicine disregarding IP lawfare.

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This is less about innovation and more about near-coercion to take the treatment. The price doesn't matter if people are not required/compelled to purchase it. When people are forced to take it to work or travel, then price matters because it looks like compelled theft.

Of course liberals are bending over backwards to defend big business and outrageous (actual) profiteering now, as evidenced by you being downvoted into oblivion. The merger of private corporations and public power, the definition of fascism.

Meanwhile they think Twitter is literally just fascist or something (whereas just a little while ago it was a private business free to do whatever it wanted, when they were censoring unfavorable media about political opponents as well as the opponents themselves). They flip flop like a weathervane in a hurricane.

That's absolutely a red-herring, Pfizer can only increase their prices like this thanks to state protection of their business practices and intellectual property.

Yes. It's important to remember that large parts of the global population are still banned from entering the USA because they didn't take the shots. For instance about a third of the Swiss population still cannot enter America for any reason, not even family connections, about 10% of the British population (officially; unofficially it's more like 25%). And now they want to add it to the childhood vaccination schedule which is the ultimate mandate.

And then we must recall that people are forced to pay for millions of doses by governments that are then left to expire because people didn't want them. A problem that does not happen if you let people make up their own mind whether to buy or not using their own funds. So there is still enormous levels of coercion involved with forcing people to "buy" this product.

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