alt Hacker NewsNo. 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.
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The mandate is the government support, it’s a purchase guarantee.
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?
*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...