This is concerning because it is clear that we’ll need more and better vaccines (and new antibiotics) in the years to come. The impact of every mosquito borne disease entering and re-entering North America, along with the already surging cases of tick borne illness means pretty soon the United States will either be afraid to go outside or considerably worse off than people even realize. The nCOV outbreak is just the latest in an ongoing string of pandemics that modern air travel brings along with its benefits.
Renewed funding heavy vaccine and antibiotic development would save millions in the US and abroad, sooner than we think.
I strongly agree that this matter really is a matter of funding priorities. Regardless how it is funded, taxpayer dollars or medical costs, this should be funded for the benefit of society.
And as far as I can tell, Pharma cos stand to make some solid revenue from this, so lets get the risk/reward commensurate with the value society gains from this line of work.
How do you wager Pharma makes good revenue from this? Compared to a chronically used drug like a statin, they DON'T stand to gain that much. It's a tragedy of the commons...any one company or nation could invest heavily, but it's a vaccine...therefore, it'll be widely disseminated once and it'll be cheap. It won't be taken years on end like a statin: MUCH less revenue; I'm not sure pharma would be interested without great incentives.
furthermore, I think there is a decent amount of abandoned IP from antibiotic companies that folded. I don't think anyone has found it viable to even manufacture them at a profit.
There probably is, but have any of them been approved for commercial sale? That's the bottleneck that controls the industry. Creating a new antibiotic that might work is not that expensive, relatively speaking. Neither is manufacturing at scale. Proving that it's safe and effective to the current standards is extremely expensive, and risky - you get nothing at all if it eventually proves not to be effective enough.
There are examples linked elsewhere in this thread of novel antibiotic companies with FDA approval declaring bankruptcy due to lack of revenue. We intentionally want to limit the use of novel antibiotics to as few cases as possible to minimize resistance. Combined with price controls, this kills the economic viability.
I actually sympathize with the drug makers here. This type of work is a public health priority, why not just white-label it and have the government just fund it?
It's particularly bizarre to me that flu shots just deliver an amazing public benefit, why charge anything? The government spends a fortune on development and distribution costs. Why not just pay for the administration, or even provide incentives to drive more adoption? If you paid a bounty to CVS/Walgreens/WalMart, they would hand out coupons or free donuts to lure people in and get much high vaccination rates.
The government already funds most of the research, the least big pharma can do is not be greedy for a minute. Salk gave away the polio vaccine in the 1950's eradicating the disease, missing out on selling it for billions in 1950's money value.
Government funds the foundation research, yes. But commercialization, especially certification, goes into billions of dollars that governments worldwide have decided that should be taken on by private companies.
What a goddamn waste. I would hope someday all governments pay a fixed share of national income / national budget to the UN which then centrally funds vaccine and other pharma (antibiotics!) development and distribution worldwide...
Oh, you don't like to lose your profits a little bit during a health crisis? Boo hoo
How does it feel to become a state owned company and have the profits of labor never go into a CEO or shareholders hands again? Because I know many people who want exactly this for rackets like biotech companies
Sorry capitalists, if you try to win all the time than everyone will lose but you'll lose harder than the proletariat does because you have more to lose
You can make all the threats about nationalization you want, but if you think that's going to happen in America anytime soon, to any company here, you're delusional. I'm not saying it's a good or bad idea, just that the idea of any company in America being nationalized at all is crazy; it's so against the current political climate that it really is impossible to happen. Even if the Democrats win this election it will never happen, but the idea of Trump signing off on nationalizing anything at all is insane.
In European nations, however, it could happen, but even there I have a hard time seeing it. If any nation nationalizes vaccine R&D in my lifetime, I'd put money on it being China.
>nationalize, verb, (of a government) to take control of a business or industry[1]
Nationalizing a company or industry is very different than paying a company to do something on contract or
hiring government employees to do the work.
Nationalization usually involves the seizure of a business or forced buyout, and then making it illegal for competition to form.
Pharmaceuticals don't want to make vaccines and aren't standing in the way. If the government really thinks that it can make vaccines cheaper, it should make a factory and hire workers.
Maybe they should nationalize tech. By most metrics it is far worse than the pharma industry.
It has higher revenue, higher profits, and higher percent profits.
Pharma has provided tremendous benefit to society, curing disease, subsets of cancer, blindness, improving countless lives.
On the other hand, many argue that much of tech is detrimental to society, encouraging instant gratification at the cost of long term happiness. Apple's 2019 revenue was >260B USD. More than the top 5 pharma companies combined.
I disagree, I don't think markets are a panacea (pun not intended), but I feel they can do a pretty good job of identifying issues, even if they are the problem per se.
When I read this, what I got out of it is that the governments aren't currently prepared to follow through on or properly fund these vaccine initiatives. Intuitively it sort of feels like an IT department problem, i.e. "why do we need you? everything's fine." I feel like a lot of things that aren't seen as a current concern, or are somewhat speculative in nature, have little chance of getting proper funding from the political realm.
I just think it's naive to assume taking profit factors away via nationalization or some other such coercion will magically solve everything. This stuff has a price, and if society isn't willing to take that price seriously, I don't really see justice in dumping all the blame on big bad pharma.
Well, we can look at a place without much government to see how well their innovation is doing: Somalia. How many vaccines, or anything really, have they come up with?
This feels like it raises the question of what kind of drug development pipeline we want to invest into.
Drug company profits generally come from serving the needs of the well-to-do in the global north. We will obviously need new vaccines and antibiotics as time goes on. I wonder if the expensive research infrastructure setup to target the high-profit drugs is the same as the one we would build to target vaccines and antibiotics. There's an element of systemic & structural dissonance here too - if we start dying from drug resistant strains of endemic diseases, those high profit drugs probably aren't going to keep selling well.
We need to think seriously about how to construct a drug development ecosystem that balances our needs. I don't think it's as simple as "nationalize the drug companies" (though I think they are pretty morally bankrupt).
It would be nice if we could come up with a system that rewards doing the most good.
The problem is, does "the most good" mean treats the largest number of people, or treats the most virulent conditions, or something else.
Right now, we're largely using "the most good" to mean "the most good for shareholders," which is how we ended up with a bunch of different wiener pills and breast cancer is still a thing.
Viagra exists yet breast cancer is still a thing because cancer is way harder to solve. And there is an enormous amount of money in cancer. Cancer drugs are some of the most profitable drugs to research right now.
And discovering viagra was a complete accident while trying to develop a pill for cardiovascular disease.
> Viagra exists yet breast cancer is still a thing because cancer is way harder to solve.
I am not sure that breast cancer is a good example. There have been a lot of exciting advances in breast cancer therapy including therapy that tries to cure the cancer but still preserves the breast. Five year survival rate is near 90%. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
>we're largely using "the most good" to mean "the most good for shareholders
An alternative framing is that, "doing the most good" is determined by what the public is willing to pay for. The public thinking cancer treatments are very good because the impacts are immediate and obvious. The public also cares deeply about their wiener.
We've "regulated [it] away" in the sense that drugs that only pull in $1m a year aren't considered economically viable. I'm not sure regulation is the appropriate villian in this case.
FTA:
>new antibiotics typically end up with list prices in the $2,000 — $3,000 range (for a one-time cure!) while payers gladly shell out tens or hundreds of thousands for cancer drugs or medicines for rare genetic diseases. Low sales volumes (due to stewardship) and low price points (due to DRG-driven pricing pressures) result in minimal sales for novel antibiotics. Achaogen’s new antibiotic was seeing unimpressive sales of around a million dollars per quarter before the company folded. At these sales figures, the company would have never recouped the cost of developing the drug.
Of course, we don't want antibiotics to cost $10k a unit, much less $100k. Thus my question about the implicit assumption that the same development pipeline that's working on $100k+ cancer drugs is suitable for antibiotic development.
The current regulations are setup so that it costs a mountain of money to make an antibiotic and you can only make a molehill of money. That seems like regulating the R&D away.
Of course what you want is antibiotics to cost a dollar and be as safe as apply pie and as plentiful as salt water. But that's not really an options. Our options are the status quo, heavily subsidize antibiotic research and pricing, reduce regulations so they can be developed incredibly cheaply, or change regulations to drive up sales.
>The current regulations are setup so that it costs a mountain of money to make an antibiotic and you can only make a molehill of money. That seems like regulating the R&D away.
So why can't pharma companies move their operations to countries with fewer regulations?
Well if you're making a drug to immunize against Ebola, you don't really need it to be FDA approved, since most of the Ebola is in Africa. Getting it approved in Uganda is sufficient. Then, if it comes across the Atlantic and starts killing Americans left and right, while Africans are immunized because their approval process was easier, it would be interesting to see what the FDA does.
The reason why $1m/yr isn't enough isn't because the pharma companies are just too greedy. It's because conducting the clinical trial required to get them through regulation is so massively expensive that they can't make anything at all at those revenue levels.
Maybe it's time we back up and rethink what we really want here. It seems like the root cause is the highly risk-adverse regulation environment. The Government could take a bigger role in drug/vaccine development, but it seems unlikely that getting the Government more involved will result in a faster-moving and less risk-adverse development system that can rapidly apply sufficient resources to address a sudden threat, and then follow through with the development even after the immediate threat has already abated. It seems like the solution is to make the regulatory/approval environment less strict and expensive instead. That will allow anyone who develops drugs, whether large or small private companies or Government agencies, to get them to the public more rapidly.
They don't want to do this anymore? No problem. We'll just withhold FDA approval from all their drugs until they do. Problem solved. It's amazing what you can do when you're not in the pocket of big phrama. We're supposed to believe these companies that ravage our nation with all sorts of fucked up drugs (opiates being only one of many) deserve pity or mercy or compassion as if they were people? Ludicrous. No, they deserve the complete and total brutality of our nascent authoritarian state. Of course, this is a fantasy and that authoritarianism will only be used against individuals to protect such disgusting entities as the pharma companies, but one can always dream.
Maybe it includes parent trying to figure out how they will provide their children with lifesaving insulin that costs pennies to produce but somehow ends up costing the consumer thousands of dollars a month. Want to make a bet about which group is bigger?
What happened to the old wisdom "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?"
We know how many diseases start, why almost no discussion of prevention when vaccines are brought up as if they are the only way (or even best way) to deal with diseases?
According to your article, this might help ease the symptoms of the flu. So it's just as useful in prevention as decongestants, cough drops, expectorant, and other such drugs: not at all. It just helps you get through the infection.
Anecdata: I got the flu a couple years ago. I didn't go to the doctor to get it "officially" confirmed, but I've had the flu many times prior in my life. It was the flu. I was laying in my bed literally crying, sleeping, sweating, or some combination of the 3 all day. My wife knew about this property of elderberry and had already made some extract with the highest grain alcohol she could get in the store and fresh elderberries from our bushes.
She fed me several spoonfuls through the day. The next day I was working in the yard. It was by far the shortest episode of the flu I have ever had.
You can't prevent a "disease" from happening anymore than you can prevent a car crash. But there is more than just air-bags for car crashes. There is crumple zones, seat belts, a-frames and all kinds of things.
So why not discuss all other options for preventing disease?
If you say there are none, there is no point in trying to educate you from nothing, go google some stuff about prevention.
It is not in the best interest of Big Pharma to cure anything. The best possible outcome for Big Pharma is to develop products that makes everything chronic so that you can live as long as you continue taking their product. For the rest of your life you will be refilling your prescriptions. You know, HaaS, health as a service. Just make sure you update your payment method when your credit card info changes.
There are a category of people that vaccines are useless for. Elderly and very young who have very weak systems. People are deathly ill with some other disease already. And people with no immune system at all. (auto-immune disease)
These categories (and maybe others) are widely known (no disputes what so ever) in the medical industry.
So why do people get so irrational around any discussions about vaccines? They simply don't help everyone, this is a fact.
> There are a category of people that vaccines are useless for.
And as long as everyone else interacting with those people are vaccinated, those people will benefit from herd immunity. That is: vaccines are prevention, even for those people who cannot be vaccinated.
> So why do people get so irrational around any discussions about vaccines?
Because "discussions about vaccines" almost always ends up being a dogwhistle for "vaccines are harmful" and/or "people who can be vaccinated shouldn't be vaccinated".
Everything has flaws. That doesn't mean we should disregard them.
Vaccines are an effective first line of defense. If you are able to be vaccinated, there is zero good reason to not do so (besides perhaps cost, but they're typically a lot cheaper than other methods of prevention). It ain't about "sacred cows"; it's about what actually works and is safe and effective and practical, and vaccines are all of the above.
Vaccine deficiencies is a scientific discussion, which is _why_ we need multiple preventions. No one single method is perfect, so the more we have the better off we are.
But just brining up "prevention" some how generates irate irrational responses.
Yes, vaccines have become a sacred cow. If you say vaccines are perfect, your are unscientific and pushing propaganda.
If you can't openly discuss the flaws of vaccines, then it's a sacred cow to you.
A challenge: discuss the imperfections of vaccines.
Do you think the CDC's list for prevention is pointless? Here's the CDC's list of prevention actions (besides avoiding contact):
* Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
* If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.
* Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.
* Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
* Stay home when you are sick.
* Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
* Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
If the people want's vaccines, then the government should pay these companies to develop them. No different than the people/government/military wanting new planes and paying defense contractors to develop them.
There's a military-industrial complex that isn't perfect, but works. If it's important enough then there should be a health-industrial complex to develop the technologies, medicines, treatments, etc.. that would be too expensive/unprofitable to develop otherwise.
Total privatization is not a good idea, as having companies bid for contracts at least introduces some competition into the process, and some incentive to innovate.
One issue is that intellectual property is vastly different in military and healthcare industries. It'd be a monumental task to re-create an aircraft carrier or fighter jet in another country, but recreate a drug that's taken billions to develop? Well that takes a small team of organic chemists and a small factory in India or elsewhere. Furthermore, vaccines are not typical drugs, they are one-use only, which is not a good profit-generator...there is not a good corollary in the military space for one-off vs. chronic drugs.
The comparison of the two industries is a stretch, IMO. Completely different business models.
Maybe not such a stretch. The nation wants aircraft carriers, and ideally wants other countries not to have similar ones. The nation also wants vaccines, but if the rest of the world gets to copy them, so much the better! Then perhaps the pandemic stops closer to source.
In both of these, the proposed business model is that you make what the government asks you to make. And of course you build your factories in certain senator's backyards, and so on... it's not going to be done for precisely the minimum possible cost. But it can get done.
>It'd be a monumental task to re-create an aircraft carrier or fighter jet in another country, but recreate a drug that's taken billions to develop? Well that takes a small team of organic chemists and a small factory in India or elsewhere.
So what's the problem here? Do you want people in other countries to die of preventable diseases or something?
The problem of IP and one-use is exactly the problem that subsidization solves. The company can develop medicine, even sell it for cheaper internationally because the r&d costs were covered by the government.
The post is an essay about how the government has historically misdirected private resources by poorly assessing threats in times of crisis. Why does that make you think that government should be more involved in healthcare?
The government doesn't require a profit before working on a vaccine. The article clearly states that private companies will not work on new vaccines unless there's profits to be made.
“The only real expertise in the world to make these vaccines in a quantity and a safety environment is in the private sector,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. “If the private sector isn’t fully engaged and involved, it’s a show stopper.”
That doesn't sound very hard to me. Hire people who have the skills necessary, pay them a fair wage (lower probably than they'll make in a corporation, but they'll be working for the people rather than a robber-baron), and let them make vaccines. Aside from the cost, is it really that difficult to do this? We've spent much more on war.
A vaccine or a life-saving medical treatment is not a product in the traditional sense of the word. You can't comparison shop when you have 2 weeks to live.
It is definitely a product. It's not a commodity, but lots of real products aren't, despite how the logic of the perfection of markets only works with commodities (in fact, the goal of everyone starting a business is to make their products non-commodities.)
I think it's more important to talk about air travel. Not only it's bad for the planet, it essentially turns every new flu virus to a pandemic. School holidays, travel, normal holidays/recess, remote work could and should be used for public health purposes. [Edit: what i'm saying is there should be motives to limit air travel during flu season, and maybe schools could align holidays / recess with flu season]
As for pharma, well they 've contributed to the establishment of the current model according to which their FDA-approved monopolies are their moneymakers, everything else is a loss. The solution is to deregulate both ways, shorten or partially abolish drug patents
90 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadRenewed funding heavy vaccine and antibiotic development would save millions in the US and abroad, sooner than we think.
And as far as I can tell, Pharma cos stand to make some solid revenue from this, so lets get the risk/reward commensurate with the value society gains from this line of work.
It's particularly bizarre to me that flu shots just deliver an amazing public benefit, why charge anything? The government spends a fortune on development and distribution costs. Why not just pay for the administration, or even provide incentives to drive more adoption? If you paid a bounty to CVS/Walgreens/WalMart, they would hand out coupons or free donuts to lure people in and get much high vaccination rates.
What a goddamn waste. I would hope someday all governments pay a fixed share of national income / national budget to the UN which then centrally funds vaccine and other pharma (antibiotics!) development and distribution worldwide...
How does it feel to become a state owned company and have the profits of labor never go into a CEO or shareholders hands again? Because I know many people who want exactly this for rackets like biotech companies
Sorry capitalists, if you try to win all the time than everyone will lose but you'll lose harder than the proletariat does because you have more to lose
In European nations, however, it could happen, but even there I have a hard time seeing it. If any nation nationalizes vaccine R&D in my lifetime, I'd put money on it being China.
Alternatively, the government could hire the expertise to make vaccines.
Nationalizing a company or industry is very different than paying a company to do something on contract or hiring government employees to do the work.
Nationalization usually involves the seizure of a business or forced buyout, and then making it illegal for competition to form.
Pharmaceuticals don't want to make vaccines and aren't standing in the way. If the government really thinks that it can make vaccines cheaper, it should make a factory and hire workers.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/national...
It has higher revenue, higher profits, and higher percent profits.
Pharma has provided tremendous benefit to society, curing disease, subsets of cancer, blindness, improving countless lives.
On the other hand, many argue that much of tech is detrimental to society, encouraging instant gratification at the cost of long term happiness. Apple's 2019 revenue was >260B USD. More than the top 5 pharma companies combined.
This is ripe for pump-and-dump schemes. No thank you.
When I read this, what I got out of it is that the governments aren't currently prepared to follow through on or properly fund these vaccine initiatives. Intuitively it sort of feels like an IT department problem, i.e. "why do we need you? everything's fine." I feel like a lot of things that aren't seen as a current concern, or are somewhat speculative in nature, have little chance of getting proper funding from the political realm.
I just think it's naive to assume taking profit factors away via nationalization or some other such coercion will magically solve everything. This stuff has a price, and if society isn't willing to take that price seriously, I don't really see justice in dumping all the blame on big bad pharma.
Wouldn't that make things worse? This is a failure by government, adding more government doesn't exactly seem like the right solution.
Perhaps we are already in a sweet spot, and neither more or less markets is the solution.
>A number of flu vaccine manufacturers were left on the hook with ordered but unpaid for vaccine during the mild 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
Expecting pharma to act as charitable NGOs seems like an unstable solution. Moreso as the PR vale decreases with public attention span.
Who is working on the vaccines for 2019-ncov?
Drug company profits generally come from serving the needs of the well-to-do in the global north. We will obviously need new vaccines and antibiotics as time goes on. I wonder if the expensive research infrastructure setup to target the high-profit drugs is the same as the one we would build to target vaccines and antibiotics. There's an element of systemic & structural dissonance here too - if we start dying from drug resistant strains of endemic diseases, those high profit drugs probably aren't going to keep selling well.
We need to think seriously about how to construct a drug development ecosystem that balances our needs. I don't think it's as simple as "nationalize the drug companies" (though I think they are pretty morally bankrupt).
The problem is, does "the most good" mean treats the largest number of people, or treats the most virulent conditions, or something else.
Right now, we're largely using "the most good" to mean "the most good for shareholders," which is how we ended up with a bunch of different wiener pills and breast cancer is still a thing.
And discovering viagra was a complete accident while trying to develop a pill for cardiovascular disease.
I am not sure that breast cancer is a good example. There have been a lot of exciting advances in breast cancer therapy including therapy that tries to cure the cancer but still preserves the breast. Five year survival rate is near 90%. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
An alternative framing is that, "doing the most good" is determined by what the public is willing to pay for. The public thinking cancer treatments are very good because the impacts are immediate and obvious. The public also cares deeply about their wiener.
I think that's a very seriously flawed metric to measure what's "doing the most good".
That said, it is a hell of a lot better than most of the alternatives.
Here's an explanation from a founder on why the numbers for anti-biotic R&D don't work.
https://endpts.com/biopharma-has-abandoned-antibiotic-develo...
FTA: >new antibiotics typically end up with list prices in the $2,000 — $3,000 range (for a one-time cure!) while payers gladly shell out tens or hundreds of thousands for cancer drugs or medicines for rare genetic diseases. Low sales volumes (due to stewardship) and low price points (due to DRG-driven pricing pressures) result in minimal sales for novel antibiotics. Achaogen’s new antibiotic was seeing unimpressive sales of around a million dollars per quarter before the company folded. At these sales figures, the company would have never recouped the cost of developing the drug.
Of course, we don't want antibiotics to cost $10k a unit, much less $100k. Thus my question about the implicit assumption that the same development pipeline that's working on $100k+ cancer drugs is suitable for antibiotic development.
Of course what you want is antibiotics to cost a dollar and be as safe as apply pie and as plentiful as salt water. But that's not really an options. Our options are the status quo, heavily subsidize antibiotic research and pricing, reduce regulations so they can be developed incredibly cheaply, or change regulations to drive up sales.
So why can't pharma companies move their operations to countries with fewer regulations?
Maybe it's time we back up and rethink what we really want here. It seems like the root cause is the highly risk-adverse regulation environment. The Government could take a bigger role in drug/vaccine development, but it seems unlikely that getting the Government more involved will result in a faster-moving and less risk-adverse development system that can rapidly apply sufficient resources to address a sudden threat, and then follow through with the development even after the immediate threat has already abated. It seems like the solution is to make the regulatory/approval environment less strict and expensive instead. That will allow anyone who develops drugs, whether large or small private companies or Government agencies, to get them to the public more rapidly.
Do you believe this "we" will include mothers with children dying from currently incurable cancers?
We know how many diseases start, why almost no discussion of prevention when vaccines are brought up as if they are the only way (or even best way) to deal with diseases?
I would love to hear your thoughts on how flu or measles can be reliably prevented on a population basis without the use of vaccines?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190423133644.h...
She fed me several spoonfuls through the day. The next day I was working in the yard. It was by far the shortest episode of the flu I have ever had.
So why not discuss all other options for preventing disease?
If you say there are none, there is no point in trying to educate you from nothing, go google some stuff about prevention.
These categories (and maybe others) are widely known (no disputes what so ever) in the medical industry.
So why do people get so irrational around any discussions about vaccines? They simply don't help everyone, this is a fact.
And as long as everyone else interacting with those people are vaccinated, those people will benefit from herd immunity. That is: vaccines are prevention, even for those people who cannot be vaccinated.
> So why do people get so irrational around any discussions about vaccines?
Because "discussions about vaccines" almost always ends up being a dogwhistle for "vaccines are harmful" and/or "people who can be vaccinated shouldn't be vaccinated".
Vaccines are a sacred cow to too many people. They have flaws and aren't perfect.
Vaccines are an effective first line of defense. If you are able to be vaccinated, there is zero good reason to not do so (besides perhaps cost, but they're typically a lot cheaper than other methods of prevention). It ain't about "sacred cows"; it's about what actually works and is safe and effective and practical, and vaccines are all of the above.
But just brining up "prevention" some how generates irate irrational responses.
Yes, vaccines have become a sacred cow. If you say vaccines are perfect, your are unscientific and pushing propaganda.
If you can't openly discuss the flaws of vaccines, then it's a sacred cow to you.
A challenge: discuss the imperfections of vaccines.
Nobody said that.
Nearly everyone I meet is so irrational that there can't be a scientific discussion about vaccines.
Can you propose one single negative to vaccine use?
Can you?
Because it's practically impossible to "prevent" diseases like this Coronavirus outbreak.
Of course, I suspect what you mean by "prevention" is "stop all these diseased brown people from traveling to where the nice clean white people are".
Are you saying they have labelled themselves incorrectly?
The CDC's page on coronavirous discusses prevention:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/about/prevention.html
Do you think the CDC's list for prevention is pointless? Here's the CDC's list of prevention actions (besides avoiding contact):
* Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
* If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.
* Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.
* Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
* Stay home when you are sick.
* Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
* Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
There's a military-industrial complex that isn't perfect, but works. If it's important enough then there should be a health-industrial complex to develop the technologies, medicines, treatments, etc.. that would be too expensive/unprofitable to develop otherwise.
Total privatization is not a good idea, as having companies bid for contracts at least introduces some competition into the process, and some incentive to innovate.
The comparison of the two industries is a stretch, IMO. Completely different business models.
In both of these, the proposed business model is that you make what the government asks you to make. And of course you build your factories in certain senator's backyards, and so on... it's not going to be done for precisely the minimum possible cost. But it can get done.
So what's the problem here? Do you want people in other countries to die of preventable diseases or something?
That doesn't sound very hard to me. Hire people who have the skills necessary, pay them a fair wage (lower probably than they'll make in a corporation, but they'll be working for the people rather than a robber-baron), and let them make vaccines. Aside from the cost, is it really that difficult to do this? We've spent much more on war.
As for pharma, well they 've contributed to the establishment of the current model according to which their FDA-approved monopolies are their moneymakers, everything else is a loss. The solution is to deregulate both ways, shorten or partially abolish drug patents
So you want to go back to the days of growing your own tomatoes in your own garden, and abandon trade and modern technologies?
No it does not. This is patently false.
Suggesting that the human race stop traveling to stop any potential diseases from traveling also is delusional.
https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/92/12/14-135590/en/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4177799/