This statement seems to assume that a limited duration of protection is a given. We don't know that. It could also as well be that it is actually impossible to clear out all reservoirs of the virus in the body once someone was infected. No need to assume nefarious intent (i.e. it being designed to keep people sick) right from the beginning.

It was more of "If I would have to make sure there will be a steady revenue stream in the future, I would also try to achieve a limited time protection effect".

What's good about open markets is that if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his/hers. This gives you an incentive to create such product yourself.

Nah. Talk to the other producer(s) in secret and make a gentleman's agreement not to create a permanent cure. The regulations surrounding pharmaceuticals is enough to prevent other companies from entering the market. Illegal as shit but crimes have happened before.

Ugh, those dumb "withholding the cure" conspiratorial tropes. Have you looked at infamous asset striping companies and corporate raiders? Or even the short-termism of most companies? They don't think beyond optimizing next quarter share price and this is the default the business model of a publicly traded company which bucks the trend is noted when describing a company and not the other way around. That is a 0-bit compression case.

There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation.

The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash.

This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?

What's the solution? Maybe more gov investment? The chinese surely have that part covered.

there is no simple solution which can be summed up for a ycombinator comment.

that doesn't mean that the issue isn't real or isn't happening, because capitalism very much incites this kind of behaviour. That doesn't mean that abandoning capitalism is the right approach either, because that also solved other issues that would come back without it. Its just not an easy situation, but its nonetheless a reality that we have to admit that this kind of behaviour is highly rewarded with our current system and expect corporations to do whatever they can get away with, because most of the people that reach the highest position are amoral, simply because you cannot get to this kind of position without having that character trait

The problem is usually not one of legality but of optimization, so it's hard to "fix" without using a heavy hand. You can't force companies to invest in cures rather than treatment, especially at the cost of profit. And many individual parties will reach the same conclusion independently, with no need for collusion [0]. In this case it's not hard to arrive at the conclusion that:

> While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

> the success of [the cure] has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

There is no simple solution is because Capitalism without regulation is tyranny. Regulations are good things, and if regulators need regulation that is far better than the tyranny that would arise without regulation, or enforcement of regulations. Similar to the cherry picking of enforcement, and regulation capture all too prevalent now.

Checks and balances are rational, while no checks and balances is insane and a recipe for mass corruption. This down vote demonstrates the success propaganda.

Transparency, or a bigger push towards crowd science platforms for open source drugs. Basically people who have in interest in medicines because it’s their passion work together like how the open source community works together. And then people like us find those projects. Idk health is not something we should pick and choose who gets what, that is causing a ton of unease under the surface that is bubbling up. You can only gas something so much before the amount of gas build up faster than released. But hopefully we start by making it illegal for politicians to own stock while in office.

> health is not something we should pick and choose who gets what

It's not possible for everyone to get the best of everything. After all, markets are about distributing scarce resources, not abundant ones.

well there is innovation, what was scarce years ago became less scarce through creative thinking, we have not arrived at the end of a thought yet, things evolve and what we call scarce today is not even a tip of the resources the future will see. the more minds we have working on something the more we realize of previous definition of scarcity was just in thought and not in product

  > if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his

That's what patents are (abused) for.

  > if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his

Whoever creates the permanent solution is likely to maximise profits, charging a premium which people may begrudgingly pay to not have the inconvenience of renewing their protection.

I expect there would be a balance point for those who can afford and those who cannot.

In practice everyone will collude to have chronic treatments and do bullshit clinical trials that prove non inferiority. And regulators are asleep at the wheel.

Prescription drugs are not an open market.

At the less extreme end, you have FDA authority to approve a product. At the more extreme end, you have the entire corporate media establishment lined up against you and doctors threatened with disbarment for prescribing (or even just advising) off-label.

Incorrect.

No need to pretend not to know that it's possible for a researcher to do their honest best and arrive at a subscription service palliative, and at the same time for the c-suite to think "nice".

> This statement seems to assume that a limited duration of protection is a given. We don't know that.

you can be sure they will design it like that or select the right versions that have such properties. Thats what you end up with MBAs leading businesses everywhere.

If you think scientists can intentionally design something to be transient you’re showing your absolute ignorance of scientific research.

When you work on hard problems like this you’re thankful it works at all.

> If you think scientists can intentionally design something to be transient

Not to be alarmist, but this does happen. There are many classes of drugs that both offer temporary and permanent treatments. Often times, these have different tradeoffs.

You're right, but maybe missing the point? Everything is subject to capitalism and market viability. There are a lot of hard problems that have commercially unviable solutions. mRNA vaccines were largely in this category until COVID. Anything that makes a solution less commercially viable (e.g. permanence) reduces R&D funding.

How cute.. Even a trees can only grow where the gardener lets them.

The mRNA vaccines aren't a conspiracy to milk and control the population, some people are trying their very best to do good. ALSO, there are people that have a sole "job" of milking every cent possible and others that use this as an opportunity to gain influence and advance whatever political/business career they pursuit.

This happens everywhere and every time.

Yes, this "they are in this to get us" get's tiring but let's not put the "scientists" in a pedestal, because they are people e many of them aren't even scientists.

This has nothing to do with scientist motivations and everything to do with scientific advancement.

If you think you scientists have multiple options in front of them and can pick the most financially opportunistic one, you have no idea what R&D is like

I’ve been in the lab, have you?

Did you understood this expression? - "Even trees can only grow where the gardener lets them."

Considering research “paths” are often measured in decades I’d be massively impressed if a scientist could guess what would be profitable 20 years from now.

To your point, opioids are a great example of meds in a profits- first world.

That aside, it certainly possible to have infinite respect for the scientific method, but at the same time be mindful that method meets reality via (often very flawed) humans. Questioning the human element in this equation doesn't make you anti-science (because there's a difference between the two).

> Combined with effect being limited in time (say, for half a year) this would create a steady revenue stream.

Why would the effect be limited? I mean it could be, but it could also cause people to turn green, not sure why we would consider either of those to be likely though without more info.

If you are assuming the effect will be limited because the effect of the covid vaccine is limited, this may be more related to covid than to mRNA vaccines, especially since the non mRNA covid vaccines seems to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines, and not more so. And after all, the mechanism of action for mRNA vaccines and non mRNA vaccines are not fundamentally different, both induce an immune response to a pathogen without giving you a disease.

The second half of the quote? At least I think that's the implication. i.e. No incentive to make it unlimited, or even an incentive to make it limited if unlimited found first. (Or both, and way mark-up the unlimited one.)

Not saying I agree/am quite that suspicious/pessimistic necessarily, but that's how I read it.

Okay, sure, but this would be quite the feat of medical engineering to hack the immune system to the point where it no longer operates as normal, as the normal function of the immune system is what determines the immune response to a vaccine and the resulting immunity.

I mean they could make one that turns you green and then mark up the one that does not also, that has not been the case, and generally vaccines produced by private companies without government involvement have significantly outperformed every vaccine made with government involvement, and every government action in US and most of the west in relation to these covid vaccines has been to favor pharmaceutical companies that make them over it's own citizenry, so basically it seems that the pharmaceutical companies that made these vaccines are much more deserving of public trust than many governments.

I mean if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you that would also create a steady revenue stream, not sure why it would be something to consider.

Obtaining a steady revenue stream is something that makes perfect sense in any business. And it's literally documented that curing a disease is a questionable business proposition for the companies that could rather sell the treatment instead. [0]

On the other hand turning people green or any other such random proposition makes no sense. This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green". And I don't even want to get into the whole "if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you" nonsense. It's not making the point you think it's making, it just makes it look like you don't understand the discussion.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-n...

> This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument

If you have to back your argument up by some analyist saying companies woudl make more money if they did something other than they were doing, then that does not make your argument strong.

> that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green".

And yet instead of citing an actual case of this, you cite an analyst that says companies would make more money by not curing diseases. Companies would also make more money if they kidnapped people's children and ransomed them back than if they did not do that, ignoring pesky things like legality and all that of course, but who knows, I'm sure politicans that would allow them to do this would be a dime a dozen anyway.

You take some effort to reject my arguments with far weaker ones (ridiculous even) yet you don't propose anything realistic. All evidence is pointing at the same conclusion. From a business perspective in some case treating a problem generates more revenue than curing it so going that route is a sound business decision.

- the green people "argument" - yes, they could turn people green. But what sells is turning people white, something many black celebrities actually do (skin whitening, look it up).

- the even more ridiculous "kidnap your kids" idea - they could but the kidnapping model triggers a response that grows exponentially towards life threatening for the kidnappers, making it particularly risky, expensive, and difficult to implement. Not a good business proposition, hence it only happens in some countries where victims have few protections, and the response from authorities can be "mitigated" cheaply.

- it's "just a report" - but one with uncontested premise and conclusion, and even confirmed in practice. Pharma companies routinely jack up prices by orders of magnitude even for drugs that are cheaper to make than ever, because they are needed in ongoing treatment (basic things like insulin, 70 years old anti-parasitic drugs, or epi-pens).

Planned obsolescence cartels have been doing the same thing a century ago [0], after not seeing much value in kidnapping kids or turning people green (presumably with green light bulbs).

You made for some really low quality conversation. I wouldn't regret I spent my time on this if I knew it got you past the "green people" and "child abduction" level of argumentation. Alas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

>Okay, sure, but this would be quite the feat of medical engineering to hack the immune system to the point where it no longer operates as normal

Is it? We had immunosuppressors for decades, we know about about AIDS and gene therapy. Doesn't sound like such an extreme feat to me.

I am pretty sure that it would be illegal to give people a vaccine designed to induce gene therapy that suppresses your immune system in order to ensure people need to get it more than once. And still, I actually trust the pharmaceutical companies to not do this more than I trust governments to not give them permission to do it, as they have been much better actors in the pandemic than almost every government.

Immunosuppressive drugs are incredibly crude and broad brush.