Your understanding is incorrect. All research is unprofitable, by definition. Vaccines are wildly profitable.

Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.

No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.

We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:

> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.

We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.

Certainly not _all_ of it, but a few billion at least.

for the curious:

https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...

Yeah, there would be none without government support.

Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?

No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.

If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.

*Pre-mrna* vaccines couldn’t be generic since it was impossible to have an exact copy of a vaccine [1], because they were created from living organisms.

It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...

The mandate is the government support, it’s a purchase guarantee.

…Which hasn’t changed.

Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.

Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.

That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...

It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.

Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...

But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?

How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?

> All research is unprofitable, by definition.

The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!

The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.

It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.

The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.