$60 billion for two years worth of shots? Sounds like a steal. Covid has cost the global economy Trillions and Trillions of dollars already, and all the downstream costs will probably add up to $100 trillion real dollars when factoring in inflation, money printing, national debt, state/provincial debts/local debts/consumer debt increases.
The world massively over reacted to covid a disease that mainly affects the old and infirm.
$60,000,000,000 / 10,000 saved works out to $6,000,000 per life saved. If the median age of death of a covid victim is 80 then this expenditure amounts to a massive misallocation of resources just on the vaccine alone never mind the hundreds of billions (actually trillions, as you say!) more spent on economically disruptive and ineffective lockdowns.
Everybody dies sooner or later. The world should never have shut down to protect people from a disease whose median death age is 80! It is social, economic and biological mass insanity.
Death isn't the only thing that comes from the virus. You're also ignoring all of the younger people who are immunocompromised or otherwise susceptible to the effects of the disease. Alternative suggestion: everyone just get their shots just like they do their flu shot and we can all move forward with our lives.
As we're seeing with the delta variant, the longer we allow the disease to vigorously spread, the potentially more dangerous it becomes.
So we (mostly) kept hospitals from having to add beds inside parking garages, and morgues from having to rent ice trucks, and perhaps we also have slowed the rate of new variants.
With the lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc, flu deaths practically dropped to zero while COVID reached #3 for causes of death in the U.S. Just how serious could that death toll have been if we hadn't "overreacted"?
I wonder how many people got the normal flu and did not report it because they did not / could not got to the doctor because of covid social distancing policies. What goes unreported does not cease to exist.
The costs of the pandemic are one side. The other is the cost of developing and producing the vaccines. In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here. The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper. After all, large sums of money have already been invested by the states for research and development. The question is what the contracts and conditions were for these investments. But if the manufacturers had hardly any costs and risks during development and are now allowed to hold the rights to the patents and make large profits with the vaccines, then in my opinion something has gone wrong. However, I don't know if that is actually the case here.
> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here.
Isn't it exactly the situation here?
I mean, a few months ago we even had central governments bid against their own local governments to have access to vaccines. Doesn't that lay out quite clearly that this is a demand-driven market?
The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return, so I just hope they have negotiated other terms to get the vaccines at fair prices.
> The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return (...)
I don't believe this is a fair or accurate description of what really happens.
Countries invest in education and free and open research, countries invest in entrepreneurship and in people launching startups, and countries invest in partnerships between their public research and private companies to foster the creation of added-value products and services.
And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.
Furthermore, your comment has nothing at all to do with markets. You're trying to pin onto the "market" tag one of the most basic characteristics of social democratic societies, where the state invests in infrastructure and in lowering or eliminating barriers to entry in business.
The initial thesis was that governments get nothing in return from their investment in education and research. This is patently false. Companies pay taxes, and the higher income they make, the more taxes they pay.
You may argue that over 20% in income tax is not enough, but in the case of BioNTech and Pfizer, you're arguing between two scenarios: seeing the states get about 20% from the profit extracted from billions in revenue, or getting zero due to the absence of any investment in education and basic research and supporting research projects.
Getting paid a 20% chunk of a multi-billion euro revenue is not small change, and this also ignores the fact that this prior investment in education and research shared with startups, which mind you supported the bulk of the development cost of these vaccines and thus enabled humanity to have vaccines with such a low turn-around time, was what ultimately allowed the world to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. How valuable is that?
Not to mention the externalities in fostering the creation of industries and high-value tech jobs.
Vaccine manufacturers are making $20-25/dose in revenue, not profit.
The price for vaccines currently being charged is absurdly reasonable. I would pay 10x the price out of pocket without a second thought, and I wouldn't care how much of that is profit for the manufacturer.
Around $20 for the incredibly new mrna based vaccines. Other versions, like oxford-astrazeneca, are single digit USD per dose. As I recall ISI has set a price ceiling of about $4/dose there.
These vaccines are so stupidly cheap and cost effective that the priority is, has been, and will be simply manufacturing and distributing enough.
> The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper.
The answer to this is emphatically no.
Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...
> there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses.
Because US and Europe can pay that much more the Big Pharma is going to make the 3rd, 4th,... booster shots instead of trying to satisfy that low-income countries demand. And making new vaccine against delta seems also less profitable than just pushing the booster shots. Immunity falling in 6 months - sounds like a situation somewhat between subscription model and 12 hours Vicodin, you can be sure that the MBAs know how to exploit it.
What happens around covid is well outside just the supposed medical issue of pandemic fighting. If anything it is seems to be primarily about business and politics. For example US officially pressured Brazil to not take Russian vaccine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/16/hhs-brazil-s... .
A good example is Singapore. Total direct costs of support for business and individuals? $60B from what I’ve seen. And that does not include the economic costs of shutting down the economy.
Cost to vaccinate everyone in the country? ~$250-500M for the vaccines alone.
The vaccines are an absolute steal at their current price..
Yeah, a global pandemic will do that to the Pharma industry. I hope to see that money being put to good use developing new methods of delivering medicine and to novel uses of mRNA technology.
It's interesting that the system working as intended is now viewed as a negative.
Is this not capitalism at work? Company provides what society needs. Right now only 2 companies provide this particular type of vaccine. More competition will come in, driving down costs.
Medicine is the only industry that can sell flawed products, offer no guarantees, and charge arbitrary prices for services without any consequence. Anyone else see parallels to organized religions of old? They even operate in the same space... curing the sick, promising long life, dictating the right way to live, holding the key to life and death. They have ordained priests that hold exclusive rights to practice the rituals. There is even a tithe in the form of medical insurance...
I speak heresy, I know. I will repent before I am burned at the stake.
Did a doctor ever give you a guarantee that their treatment would heal you? Contrast with almost any other industry... the baker telling you "this piece of bread might cure your hunger, but there is a 10% risk that it will kill you instead". Clinical trials are in many cases smoke and mirrors - very elaborate and inscrutable, but provide no guarantees in the end. When it comes down to results of medical treatments, your mileage will vary and you take the responsibility upon yourself.
> Did a doctor ever give you a guarantee that their treatment would heal you?
You don't get a guarantee that a brand of paint will work with your walls, but that does not mean paint doesn't work.
Meanwhile, personally I've enjoyed a 100% success rate in all medical treatments I was subjected to. I might be lucky, but I'm under the impression that everyone around me has been fantastically lucky as well.
Does this mean there are no conditions for which modern medicine does not have a good answer to? Absolutely. But it's my understanding that patients are indeed briefed on relative chances of success.
There are certainly some treatments that work - setting a broken bone for example - but there are many that don't work. The problem is that the truths are mixed with the untruths, and unfortunately the treatments that don't work tend to be the expensive and, by definition, the risky ones.
It comes down to overreach by the "experts". This is also not a novel concept - Socrates' famous saying "I know that I know nothing" actually refers to how most "experts" DON'T know what they don't know, and thus overreach their authority. By recognizing what he doesn't know, Socrates thus establishes his intellectual superiority. Interesting story that I don't feel like writing out in full right now, but highly relevant.
I am 100% enthusiastic about my doctor, if I want my actual experience to be ignored, an unwanted prescription for early-cholesterol junk to be pushed upon me, and a useless colonoscopy that ends with me just taking what's over the counter anyway.
What I don’t understand is how we can shut down the economy with a huge impact on small businesses, but not force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world. We complain about the unvaccinated in the US and the possibility of mutations, but then don’t do everything we can to help vaccinate the world and prevent mutations. And Russia and China are sharing the less effective vaccines they developed.[1] The whole things seems tragic, hypocritical, and an inevitable blow to America abroad.
To be fair, the vaccines we have today were literally the first ones out of the gate, and they should be considered a stopgap solution that only serves to mitigate the problems caused by the global pandemic, but they patently don't work in eliminating it or even reach herd immunity.
Basically the current batch of vaccines (the best ones, to boot) just train the immune system for it to have a fighting chance at not being overwhelmed by covid. But that's it.
Some vaccination locations even make it their point to distribute pamphlets stating quite clear that the vaccine is not a silver bullet, and all basic health and higiene precautions in place should continue to be followed.
It's far too early to talk about preventing mutations or any scenario where the current vaccines making covid is a thing of the past. If anything, the economical gains from the vaccines illustrate that much needs to be done to get a better, long-term solution.
Forcing vaccine manufacturers to give away their vaccine creates strong incentives against inventing vaccines.
It works once, but the next pandemic may happen without any vaccines.
The consensual, win-win way is to buy vaccines from the manufacturers, at high prices. This makes manufacturers wealthy by making people healthy and aligns incentives for the common good.
I was going to say the the same thing, just have both, well educated, funded scientists working for the Government (funded but still independent) and private companies competing with them too.
That’s a straw man argument. They’ve made billions and will make billions more. Nothing is being given away for free. But currently, it is in their financial interests for this pandemic to go on indefinitely with continued mutations and a never-ending need for boosters. And our free market always seems to tilt in favor of monopolies. Shut down small businesses but don’t put any pressure on big pharma. Similar to 2008, let average people suffer but prop up the banks. I believe in free markets, but there is a reason people are turning against capitalism. No markets are truly free and we need consistent values applied to players big and small. Helping the world get vaccinated is the morally right thing to do, not optimizing pharma profits for the next decade under the guise of “incentives.”
Please forgive my personal pet peeve, but nothing BurningFrog said was a straw man as far as i can tell. I don't see any way they misrepresented your argument.
“Giving away their vaccine” is the straw man. There is a huge range between free and maximum profits. I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be incentivized with a profit, the question is how much and what's in the best interest of the American people, not just Pfizer and Moderna.
So does that mean they would have not done anything unless they got paid? They would have just let people die? This is one of the many factors that doesn't add up when telling people they have a civic duty, yet the large corporations can't be held accountable and also make a huge profit.
Government could have easily forced a reasonable license where the original manufacturer gets paid per shot but is not in a position to limit availability. They are not the only ones able to manufacture these vaccines.
There is some movement in this area. While this is not absolute it at lease a reversal on the US's previous stance of protecting patents on the vaccine.
> Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine patents to boost supply - 06 May 2021
I'm fine with that if it happens in a free market under informed consent and for curing real diseases. But big pharma, big media, big tech, government and law enforcement acting in complete lockstep to forcibly inject experimental vaccines into your veins for something that amounts to a bad variant of the flu is something else entirely.
Did you ever have the flu? I bet you didn't and if you think you did, you probably had a cold instead. A runny nose, headaches, and a sore throat doesn't mean you got the flu.
The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover. You will feel like somebody ran you over with a truck. It's not fun, it's highly dangerous.
> People do tend to conflate all sorts of "coughs" together as the "flu", including many illnesses that are a lot more mild than the flu.
People do, but if you look at CDC estimates, tens of millions of people get influenza in any given year, so it's fairly like that any given adult individual has contracted influenza multiple times in their life.
FWIW, I've had the flu (confirmed with nasal swab). I was bound to bed for 2-3 days, with fever spikes above 41°C but it didn't take several weeks to recover. Barely a few days.
> The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover.
It can, but this isn't a given. Tens of millions of people get influenza yearly in the USA, and there's a wide range of estimates of asymptomatic cases, with 50% being a reasonable baseline to work from.
> Estimates of the percentage of influenza infections that are asymptomatic include a common approximation of 50% [33], 33% in 1 review [34] and 4%–28%, 0–100%, and 65%–85% in another review [35]. Both asymptomatic and symptomatic infections are captured in serological studies. The commonly cited “5%–20%” figure came from a serological study [5], and so represents both symptomatic and asymptomatic disease among a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons. If 50% of influenza were symptomatic, this would correspond to “2.5%–10%” with symptomatic disease, which is very similar to the range that we report.
bro, fuck right off with that "oh it's just the flu" shit. it's a bad faith argument and you know it.
at some lvl, I got COVID-19 in January and it was the worst month of my life, I still haven't recovered to my pre-COVID cardio endurance. I would request that you don't belittle people who have had worse experiences or died as a result of it.
if you want to let /pol/ melt your brain you are more that welcome to do that just keep it in the containment board my dude.
There are about 30 different vaccines for COVID-19 around the world. Only the most "luxurious ones" such as Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca are nucleic acid vaccines which use mRNA or DNA.
It's a "superior" technology because it costs less and our own bodies do the work so to speak. Viruses or subunits of viruses don't have to be synthesized in a lab, so the challenges which come with that don't have to be dealt with.
I'm pretty sure that this is the future of vaccines anyway.
I don’t think government, tech, and law enforcement are acting in complete lockstep. But I can believe they are acting out of fear, and fueled by social media and technology.
This worries me even more than a conspiracy, because people who are acting out of fear cannot consistently do good science or make rational decisions. When every government official, media outlet, and society at large is depending on scientists, doctors, and businesses to “fix” the pandemic so we can get back to business as usual, how strong are the incentive to cut corners or fudge some numbers if the ends justify the means? IMHO we are building lots of terrible incentive structures that are bound to blow up in our face.
There are about 30 different COVID-19 vaccines around the world, with all kinds of different technology. There are inactivated vaccines, live-attenuated vaccines, viral vector vaccines, you name it.
And then there are also nucleic acid vaccines, which deliver instructions to our cells, either as DNA or as mRNA. These aren't new, and they have been researched way before COVID-19. It's just that these vaccines save costs and time, which makes them good option for this pandemic. Do note that in less rich and developed countries, more of the other types of vaccines are being used. It's actually a luxury that we can have this type of vaccine and personally I am quite sure that this is the future of most vaccines anyway.
> I actually have no problem with pharma companies seeing huge profits from the covid vaccines.
Not that long ago people were talking about how the for-profit medical industry didn't have the best interest of the people in mind because their priority was to make money, to the detriment of people who can't afford healthcare. Now that seems to have vanished and all of a sudden they are able to still make profit while at the same time get massive public funding.
If they had taken the risks and incurred the costs of development themselves, of course. But they were massively subsidized. In that case, the state should either get a share of the profits or negotiate fair prices that exclude all too huge profits.
For creating a vaccine which solves a global pandemic I think the rewards should be pretty steep. 60 billion is peanuts on the global scale. Millions of lives have been saved.
Taxpayers want to avoid dying and these corporations want to sell them a vaccine to achieve that. Seems like a nearly perfect alignment of interests to me
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[ 261 ms ] story [ 2865 ms ] thread$60,000,000,000 / 10,000 saved works out to $6,000,000 per life saved. If the median age of death of a covid victim is 80 then this expenditure amounts to a massive misallocation of resources just on the vaccine alone never mind the hundreds of billions (actually trillions, as you say!) more spent on economically disruptive and ineffective lockdowns.
Everybody dies sooner or later. The world should never have shut down to protect people from a disease whose median death age is 80! It is social, economic and biological mass insanity.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-age-penalty-115920032...
So we (mostly) kept hospitals from having to add beds inside parking garages, and morgues from having to rent ice trucks, and perhaps we also have slowed the rate of new variants.
With the lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc, flu deaths practically dropped to zero while COVID reached #3 for causes of death in the U.S. Just how serious could that death toll have been if we hadn't "overreacted"?
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
Even if we assume last year was traumatic enough that things got missed, it seems evident that the flu took it on the chin.
Isn't it exactly the situation here?
I mean, a few months ago we even had central governments bid against their own local governments to have access to vaccines. Doesn't that lay out quite clearly that this is a demand-driven market?
I don't believe this is a fair or accurate description of what really happens.
Countries invest in education and free and open research, countries invest in entrepreneurship and in people launching startups, and countries invest in partnerships between their public research and private companies to foster the creation of added-value products and services.
And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.
Furthermore, your comment has nothing at all to do with markets. You're trying to pin onto the "market" tag one of the most basic characteristics of social democratic societies, where the state invests in infrastructure and in lowering or eliminating barriers to entry in business.
Every company needs to do that. If a government invests in a company then maybe they should also pay a HIGHER tax rate?
You may argue that over 20% in income tax is not enough, but in the case of BioNTech and Pfizer, you're arguing between two scenarios: seeing the states get about 20% from the profit extracted from billions in revenue, or getting zero due to the absence of any investment in education and basic research and supporting research projects.
Getting paid a 20% chunk of a multi-billion euro revenue is not small change, and this also ignores the fact that this prior investment in education and research shared with startups, which mind you supported the bulk of the development cost of these vaccines and thus enabled humanity to have vaccines with such a low turn-around time, was what ultimately allowed the world to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. How valuable is that?
Not to mention the externalities in fostering the creation of industries and high-value tech jobs.
The price for vaccines currently being charged is absurdly reasonable. I would pay 10x the price out of pocket without a second thought, and I wouldn't care how much of that is profit for the manufacturer.
These vaccines are so stupidly cheap and cost effective that the priority is, has been, and will be simply manufacturing and distributing enough.
The answer to this is emphatically no.
Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...
Because US and Europe can pay that much more the Big Pharma is going to make the 3rd, 4th,... booster shots instead of trying to satisfy that low-income countries demand. And making new vaccine against delta seems also less profitable than just pushing the booster shots. Immunity falling in 6 months - sounds like a situation somewhat between subscription model and 12 hours Vicodin, you can be sure that the MBAs know how to exploit it.
What happens around covid is well outside just the supposed medical issue of pandemic fighting. If anything it is seems to be primarily about business and politics. For example US officially pressured Brazil to not take Russian vaccine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/16/hhs-brazil-s... .
Indeed supply is severely limited (esp. Outside rich countries, but even inside rich countries if you go back a few months) and demand is extreme.
If this was a free market situation, pfizer would have much much more money.
Cost to vaccinate everyone in the country? ~$250-500M for the vaccines alone.
The vaccines are an absolute steal at their current price..
Is this not capitalism at work? Company provides what society needs. Right now only 2 companies provide this particular type of vaccine. More competition will come in, driving down costs.
Where do you frame mandatory requirements for clinical trials along with your personal assertion regarding "flawed products with no guarantees" ?
You don't get a guarantee that a brand of paint will work with your walls, but that does not mean paint doesn't work.
Meanwhile, personally I've enjoyed a 100% success rate in all medical treatments I was subjected to. I might be lucky, but I'm under the impression that everyone around me has been fantastically lucky as well.
Does this mean there are no conditions for which modern medicine does not have a good answer to? Absolutely. But it's my understanding that patients are indeed briefed on relative chances of success.
It comes down to overreach by the "experts". This is also not a novel concept - Socrates' famous saying "I know that I know nothing" actually refers to how most "experts" DON'T know what they don't know, and thus overreach their authority. By recognizing what he doesn't know, Socrates thus establishes his intellectual superiority. Interesting story that I don't feel like writing out in full right now, but highly relevant.
Very little in life is guaranteed. Vaccine efficacy fitting this rule shouldn't be surprising.
1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/bidens-failure-on-covid-v...
Basically the current batch of vaccines (the best ones, to boot) just train the immune system for it to have a fighting chance at not being overwhelmed by covid. But that's it.
Some vaccination locations even make it their point to distribute pamphlets stating quite clear that the vaccine is not a silver bullet, and all basic health and higiene precautions in place should continue to be followed.
It's far too early to talk about preventing mutations or any scenario where the current vaccines making covid is a thing of the past. If anything, the economical gains from the vaccines illustrate that much needs to be done to get a better, long-term solution.
It works once, but the next pandemic may happen without any vaccines.
The consensual, win-win way is to buy vaccines from the manufacturers, at high prices. This makes manufacturers wealthy by making people healthy and aligns incentives for the common good.
Second, it actually is the scientists getting rich at least in some cases: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-billionaire-couple-is-behi...
The US government has spent $5300B in pandemic relief packages. Vaccinating the planet could have been a cheap PR win barely noticed among that.
Except there just isn't production capacity for that on the planet.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/heres-everything-congress-...
But it's not like we're fully utilizing the available production capacity.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/do...
> force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world
Only experimental batches had ever been made before, and then they had to invent ways to make billions of doses.
> Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine patents to boost supply - 06 May 2021
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57004302
As I recall, this move needs further agreement between the US and its allies.
Should they not be compensated for their extremely difficult/impactful work? Why won’t someone else do it for cheaper?
The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover. You will feel like somebody ran you over with a truck. It's not fun, it's highly dangerous.
I've had the flu, I'm sure nearly everyone has had it once. It's not really incredibly uncommon.
People do, but if you look at CDC estimates, tens of millions of people get influenza in any given year, so it's fairly like that any given adult individual has contracted influenza multiple times in their life.
Disease Burden of Influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
It can, but this isn't a given. Tens of millions of people get influenza yearly in the USA, and there's a wide range of estimates of asymptomatic cases, with 50% being a reasonable baseline to work from.
See, e.g. Seasonal Incidence of Symptomatic Influenza in the United States: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/66/10/1511/4682599
> Estimates of the percentage of influenza infections that are asymptomatic include a common approximation of 50% [33], 33% in 1 review [34] and 4%–28%, 0–100%, and 65%–85% in another review [35]. Both asymptomatic and symptomatic infections are captured in serological studies. The commonly cited “5%–20%” figure came from a serological study [5], and so represents both symptomatic and asymptomatic disease among a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons. If 50% of influenza were symptomatic, this would correspond to “2.5%–10%” with symptomatic disease, which is very similar to the range that we report.
at some lvl, I got COVID-19 in January and it was the worst month of my life, I still haven't recovered to my pre-COVID cardio endurance. I would request that you don't belittle people who have had worse experiences or died as a result of it.
if you want to let /pol/ melt your brain you are more that welcome to do that just keep it in the containment board my dude.
I'm pretty sure that this is the future of vaccines anyway.
I'd want to move to that world, even if the government was nefarious. At least they're super competent.
This worries me even more than a conspiracy, because people who are acting out of fear cannot consistently do good science or make rational decisions. When every government official, media outlet, and society at large is depending on scientists, doctors, and businesses to “fix” the pandemic so we can get back to business as usual, how strong are the incentive to cut corners or fudge some numbers if the ends justify the means? IMHO we are building lots of terrible incentive structures that are bound to blow up in our face.
There are about 30 different COVID-19 vaccines around the world, with all kinds of different technology. There are inactivated vaccines, live-attenuated vaccines, viral vector vaccines, you name it. And then there are also nucleic acid vaccines, which deliver instructions to our cells, either as DNA or as mRNA. These aren't new, and they have been researched way before COVID-19. It's just that these vaccines save costs and time, which makes them good option for this pandemic. Do note that in less rich and developed countries, more of the other types of vaccines are being used. It's actually a luxury that we can have this type of vaccine and personally I am quite sure that this is the future of most vaccines anyway.
Not that long ago people were talking about how the for-profit medical industry didn't have the best interest of the people in mind because their priority was to make money, to the detriment of people who can't afford healthcare. Now that seems to have vanished and all of a sudden they are able to still make profit while at the same time get massive public funding.
For creating a vaccine which solves a global pandemic I think the rewards should be pretty steep. 60 billion is peanuts on the global scale. Millions of lives have been saved.
/s