Then there is the logistical effort of manufacturing the vaccine at the scale and speed required. There are huge capital investments and risks associated with doing that. If a company wants to do that and seek the profits from that, great. Literally everyone comes out ahead. You, me, the government, the manufacturer, distributor, and every other business or person in the economy.
What is the alternative? We create a government agency that specializes in manufacturing and distributing pharma products?
Many governments have proven that they will put the public's need over these companies need. They've broken patents and pressured companies before and they will obviously do it again.
There are more governments in the world than the American one.
For now speed is of the essence and this it's wonderful news they've set another step.
Yes. Why don't you think that would work?
We can't educate our kids at an acceptable level without billions of dollars being donated on top of all the tax collected, we can't figure out how to make medicare work responsibly despite literally being able to control costs, what do you think makes drug manufacturing any different?
If we as a people collectively agreed that we are as smart as other countries, there’s no reason we can’t have a functional government that can handle public education and vaccine efforts and keep us safe and maintain our infrastructure and everything else we expect our government to do for us.
School funding happens at the state level too, not just the federal grants.
Chicago is in Illinois, which has had a lot of flip-flopping between red and blue governors and has an infamous history of governors going to jail for corruption.
Also I'm not claiming that Democrats haven't done shitty things. Daley bankrupted Chicago and privatized a lot of our public services while running as a Democrat and some of those jailed governors were democrats, but I do think the GOP is more homogeneous in its efforts to break down the government. I mean privatizing everything is a platform they openly campaign on!
If your claim that prosperity has nothing to do with who is in charge were true, we wouldn't see a pattern of blue states outperforming red states economically or a national pattern of economic growth after a democrat president and decline after a republican president.
Coincidentally, I live in Chicago and used to live in California. People love to use both places as punching bags when talking about national problems, despite one being a state and the other a city! It's different types/scales of problems.
And why hasn’t California added free public education or expanded housing in the last 20-30 years then?
Plus, democrats are conservatives, so, it's not like they're automatically leftists just because they're blue.
No, there is not free public education anymore so in California than Texas.
> It's worth pointing out that there are literally millions of Trump supporters here
Don’t try to blame them. They have no power at the state and even the extremely Trump-devoid Bay Area (iirc <10% support) has failed to offer anything approximating a solution to housing or good education. The answer to shitty schools in the bay was a lottery to make sure everyone got to suffer the shit, rather than you know... fixing the shitty schools.
worked just fine for penicillin during world war 2
Edit: german Wikipedia suggest that the contraction is only expected to be 3% but because of the numbers involved even that doesn't really matter for the argument.
Hopefully there is some other significant differentiating characteristic or attribute to justify this state of affairs between society and big pharma, that would distinguish it from the same analysis you would use to pay a ransom or protection fee.
We are talking about a company providing a service. They might not have invented the vaccine but they are providing the means to bring it from proof of concept into mass production. The commenter seemed to think that this isn't worth money.
I argue that you get quite a bang for the buck.
My larger point is that for-profit pharma/healthcare is not a healthy marketplace (... or at best, it's an immature one). In the not-so-distant past (in America, up until the Civil War or thereabouts), firefighting was mostly privatized (meaning not government-run) [0], and brigades would compete (literally sometimes fighting in the streets, covering the hydrant to impede rival brigades, etc.) to claim the prize of the insurance payout for saving a building [1], which doesn't really serve the interests of the victims of fires.
I think the incentives of for-profit firefighters are not all that dissimilar from the incentives of modern pharma companies today (i.e. pay us to save your building from this fire, vs pay us to research this vaccine), and I would hope to evolve this pharma industry and this marketplace (of "demand" for life/health, vs "supply" of pharma research and resources) into something more mature and with fewer perverse incentives in the long-run.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#United...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Modern...
In the case of farm subsidies it’s grown to the point of being actively unhealthy both in economic terms and the actual root cause of the obesity epidemic. Without sufficient calories you can’t have an obese population due to physics. Medical subsidies have resulted in a host of related problems not just in economic costs, but also in what research gets done and how efficient that is.
The cost of Medical studies in the US has grown wildly out of proportion because their a profit center. This perversely slows down the rate of medical research, even in the case of emergencies like covid 19.
Sure you can, you just have starving poor people too.
It’s very possible for some percentage of the population to starve even during a food surplus, but starving people will bid up the cost of food to the point where you can’t get a 40% of the population to have a surplus in a famine in any society that we know about.
Here is the official definition for the minimum to qualify as a famine:
“At least 20% of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope The prevalence of acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30% The death rate exceeds two people per 10,000 people per day“
That’s killing off over 7% of the population per year.
On average your looking at ~90B in net profits from farming, the subsidies however are much harder to track down. Ethanol subsides for example are often excluded as are insurance, tariffs etc.
There are a lot of ways to slice this up. “Overall agricultural subsidies in 2010 were estimated at $172 billion by a European agricultural industry association; however, the majority of this estimate consists of food stamps and other consumer subsidies, so it is not comparable to the 2005 estimate.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
One example of this is Americans for example pay 3 billion dollars more for sugar than international market rates. But, only a fraction of that directly ends up in farmers pockets. You can either take the full 3 billion as a government subsidy or exclude most of it. Similarly, propaganda and what’s allowed in food lunch programs gets tricky.
So, I am not endorsing any specific estimate, just saying the total industry profits are approximately the same as the total subsidy. Add up just direct federal subsidies gets you lower numbers especially if you try an exclude state, ethanol, R&D, loans, Education, tax breaks, and other less obvious handouts.
PS: Silly me, I forgot about all the little exceptions in environmental, immigration, labor laws, use of federal lands, etc.
Edit: people don't seem to understand that there are several stages in pharma development... (1) research, (2) trials, (3) scaling production. It sounds to me that even if (1) and (2) are "paid for" (with public money), (3) is still non-trivial and therefore expensive.
No one is claiming otherwise. And back to normal is still a long ways off.
If you’re admitting we’re giving them money for a thing, it’s paid for. I don’t know why you quote it like that, transfer payments of public money to private institutions is a thing, is it up for debate it happens?
Also cost is emotional. Does it have to be 20 billion or is the government handing out cheddar for consulting jobs later?
There’s more too it than high school capitalist theory. Just because you can’t for $20 billion doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t for $5.
But we hide the work in private accounts. Humanities work, built towards by countless hands and minds.
Yeah ok we get it, Murray Rothbard; You’re only 1 in 7 billion. Why does your theory matter? Roll up them sleeves. What? He’s dead? In the bin with it, no need to carry water for a dead man.
And "we" are already paying for it. Let's not let them double-dip.
These things cost money, and you assume your taxes are covering them in full. They don't.
Developing vaccines is a long, treacherous journey on a narrow ledge with cliffs on either side from start to finish. Infectious diseases research has seen a sharp decline in funding and commercial interest in general. Because of how little we know about the body, most research doesn't generate results that can be turned into money. The only way to continue to support research is via public funds and grants. The public funding of science has been a major contributing factor for our advancements in this kind of research.