Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.

> Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.

Moderna existed for 10 years and burned through billion(s?) of dollars before they earned any significant revenue. It doesn't matter how much I or anyone else want to save a life, I don't have 10 years and billions of dollars to spend attempting it.

I'm not asking Moderna to commit to 10 years of research, I'm asking them to release the thing they have in their possession this very moment, and accept the risk that they might face increased competition in 5 or 10 years as a result. This is a unique global emergency, I'm not saying everything they ever develop should be immediately in the public domain.

Also, billions of those dollars were US government grants.

> I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it

Once your experts are trained and hired, their lab built and years of precursor research funded, sure, the final step is easy. But several of those layers want to be paid. If they never go into medicine, or never go into vaccine research or never build the labs, you can be heartfelt all you want when the next pandemic hits, it won’t give you vaccines in a year.

I don't really understand, why would people stop going into medicine or starting research labs? How would Moderna releasing their process crash the entire field? I'm not making a general argument that all medical research should be publicly available forever (although...), I'm making a very specific argument that in this global emergency, the benefits massively outweigh the risks. "Should I save the world or should I protect my brand" is a joke, it's not even worth asking.

I don't know if the polio analogy is overplayed at this point, but this is like polio. The vaccine needs to be freely available to the world. The absolute "worst case" is that Moderna faces increased competition in like 10 years and eventually goes out of business and its employees go work for different labs in different companies.

> in this global emergency, the benefits massively outweigh the risks

There is more than enough money to buy doses for everyone in the world at sticker price. This isn’t a debate about whether lives get saved, but about who pays for it.

Bluntly: no. Lives saved is probably not a significant component in the cost/benefit analysis when these companies are deciding how much they should invest in an avenue of research.

I understand that's not how they decide what to research, but I'm asking today, this second, why are they not factoring lives into the question "should I tell the world how to make my vaccine". I don't even know how to phrase this without sounding absurd. It's like a superhero letting the villain blow up a stadium because if the city is too safe then they might get bored and not be around when the next villain shows up in 20 years.

Do you know Peter Singer's parable of the shallow pond? Why is what you are puzzled about any different than asking yourself why you haven't donated everything you have right now to save lives in undeveloped parts of the world?

Because of the magnitude and rarity of the problem, the proven effectiveness of their solution, and the ease of releasing it. I am not arguing that every second of every person's life should be devoted to maximum lifesaving utility. I do donate a lot of my income, but I save a lot for myself because I'm a normal self-interested person. I'm not asking anyone at Moderna to make some enormous sacrifice, I'm asking them to maybe risk some potential future business opportunities. Relative to the problem I don't even consider it a sacrifice at all.

In my mind it's like an off-duty firefighter standing next to someone unconscious in a burning building and being able to easily drag them to safety, but deciding not to because it might give them back problems in a few years. It's an emergency, they know how to fix it and can do so easily, and the sacrifice is minimal compared to the danger.

Malaria vaccines are more effective than covid vaccines. Malaria kills a lot more people than covid. Why do you buy sushi instead of malaria vaccines? Relative to the problem I wouldn't consider that a sacrifice. Doesn't matter, I'm still going to buy sushi.

I get where you're coming from but people are just selfish with money, it is how it is.

I truly believe that what I'm asking Moderna to do is not much bigger than the minor sacrifices I make in my own life, mostly donating money and volunteering time. Tiny sacrifices! I have an incredibly comfortable life. If the people running Moderna did what I wanted, they would continue to have incredibly comfortable lives.

Most of the threads I've started have now devolved into people accusing me of being a hypocrite who's never sacrificed anything in my life, so I guess that's the end of the road. I still don't understand why anyone needs to be convinced that this obvious moral choice is a good thing to do, and I guess I never will.

For what it's worth, I don't think you're a hypocrite and I do sympathize with you, I wish they wouldn't pull this shit too. But they're a drug company, you have to expect them to act like a drug company. The number one thing they care about is profit.

Well you should rethink that. The people who invest in Moderna are just like you and that appeals to you because they're other people with their own money that you want to direct.

Pretty much your whole justification is that they've happened to invest in medicine and intentionally positioned themselves outside the burning building. You're investing in what? Yourself? Thin soup.

I guess the argument here is that only people as successful and powerful as the founders of Moderna are capable of judging them. You're right - despite my best efforts, I'm not there yet and probably never will be. If that's the bar, there's nothing more for me to say.

The superhero analogy is akin to saying "football is a game where you run a ball to the end of a field". It completely trivializes the realities of developing highly experimental technologies. Moderna doesn't get to fly in like an invincible superhero and defeat the villain with no real concern for whether or not they're going to be able to do it again.

But they already have the vaccine! There's no immediate risk, and the long term risk is not that serious. I guess the core thing I don't understand is why anyone would assume that releasing their process is equivalent to going bankrupt. Is this process all they have? Would releasing it eliminate all barriers of entry? Would the US government no longer be willing to give them grants if they become too philanthropic and save too many lives? Why couldn't they continue to be a wildly successful company?

It is a serious risk. Their manufacturing process and their tribal knowledge of it is all they have, save maybe political clout. Through this they prop up everything else. On top of all of this, they might not be able to convey the process to the extent needed for others to recreate it, even if they wanted to.

I work at a company that faces this as an existential threat; you might be able to knock off our products in single quantities, but because of decades of process knowledge that no single person (or even a committee of people) could tell you, you won't be able to beat us on price. Once you do that, it's over for us, and any beneficial technology that we planned on developing is going to need to be provided by our competitors, who don't actually have a culture of making improvements, only leeching them.

There are countless industries with high but tenable barriers to entry, and completely dealbreaking process knowledge that actually determines the viability of a company in that industry.

Alright, you've convinced me that it would be a real sacrifice, but it's still so obviously worth it. There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice to do what Moderna could do right now. The worst case scenario seems to be that Moderna employees with "helped develop the most effective Covid vaccine on the planet" on their resumes have to get new jobs, and new treatments based on their technology are developed more quickly now that the whole world can experiment with it.

If they can't communicate their process quickly enough because of the tribal knowledge, then no harm done, and at least they tried.

> There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice

Ha. Maybe there's little you wouldn't sacrifice that isn't yours, but there's very little you would sacrifice yourself to save someone. For $500 right now you can save someone's life for a year. What seems to be confusing you is that you're not thinking of Moderna as real people.

I donate lots of my own money directly to people who need it. No, not all of it, because as I've said I'm a normal self-interested person like the people who run Moderna. That's why I'm not asking them to sacrifice everything they have, or anything close to that. They would continue to lead incredibly privileged and comfortable lives, just like I do.

I guess you already don't believe me, but I do make sacrifices in my own life, and if I were in the position of running Moderna, I still cannot imagine being unwilling to make another one. Doesn't seem like I can convince anyone here, but that's the source of my confusion - why does anyone need to be convinced? How is this not normal? When I say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives", why is everyone like "sure buddy, you like money as much as the rest of us, we know you're lying".

Would you sacrifice hundreds of jobs (maybe even thousands if you account for second-order effects) for a chance (not a guarantee) that some other company will be able to use the technology in time to deal with the Coronavirus? Could you accept that there's a chance that new companies moving into this space will be much less cooperative if Moderna loses the fight after giving away their process?

There's a forest from the trees. Nobody here is saying that you're lying when you say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives". The majority of us would probably do the same, but those aren't the stakes, and nothing is that simple. That's not what forcing Moderna to share their process is. This is a threat to an entity that has been fairly cooperative, and it is that way because of the chance group of people and attitudes that make that entity up. There is no guarantee that whatever comes next will want to play nice.

> If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right?

There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives".

COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense.

What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions".

[1] https://www.givewell.org/ [2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk

What's more, in some cases you are required by law to at least try to save a life. For example, in some jurisdictions you are required to bring first aid to a victim of a car crash (assuming you won't endanger yourself in the process), failure to do so can result in jail time.

Concrete example is Polish Penal Code, article 162. Up to 3 years of jail time for failure to bring aid - there's a bunch of quantifiers that reduce the liability, but that's the gist of it.

I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.

At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.

We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward?

You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.

Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.

> This was all financed with government money.

Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).