Capitalism is murderous
Eh. Capitalism is murderous for many reasons but this isnt one of them. You want to have multiple vaccine candidates because you don't know effectiveness until it's tested. You also want to have some diversity. J&J's vaccine just needs standard refrig temps and a single dose, making it much easier to deliver, especially to rural areas in the global south.
What if, for example, all the companies did this and lined up behind Merck's vaccine. Merck has more experience with vaccines than any other company and has probably the best reputation in pharma. Seems like a safe bet, right?
Well they pulled their vaccine before finishing phase III trials because it wasn't effective based on the preliminary data.
That's different than what OP said, which was that all the pharma companies should have come together to produce one vaccine.
I know that Merck for example is working on licensure for one of the mRNA vaccines to get their production facilities added to the mix.
Of course vaccine production methods shouldn't be kept secret. This is a forum for communists lol.
I don't think it would have made a big difference. Like the saying goes, you can't ask nine people with wombs to make a baby in one month.
They could be produced in much bigger quantities if all the data was in the open though.
The fact that the ability to produce these vaccines is only in the hands of these companies, despite there being far, far more facilities capable of producing them, is what stands out to me as the real issue.
Moderna, for example, didn't have the capability to produce its own vaccine, so it outsourced all of its production to other companies that had suitable facilities, which just proves that anyone with the right tools could be making Moderna's vaccine! But Moderna gets to pick and choose the collaborators it needs to fill it's contracts while other suitable production facilities stay dark? It's not like we don't need more doses, considering that 99.3% of the world is still unvaccinated.
We're just refusing to scale up production beyond what these individual companies can manage because... of what, I don't even know. The sanctity of Intellectual Property law? Planned scarcity? Just good ole fashioned incompetence? I know Biden is a drooling idiot but the fact that at any point someone could just make a few phone calls and we'd suddenly double or triple or quintuple our projected vaccine production drives me crazy.
I think different research groups exploring multiple avenues is pretty standard practice. Shouldn't put all eggs in one basket when researching. Many vaccines have failed - notably Australia's COVID-19 vaccine from QUT. Id hope under communism there would be independent researchers approaching the same problem, even if there was more knowledge sharing where appropriate.
You can still do independent teams sharing data but using different approaches under communism. If anything it would be better because they can pool resources.
Also keeps people from accidentally doing the same research twice
Id hope under communism there would be independent researchers approaching the same problem, even if there was more knowledge sharing where appropriate.
Quite a bit of our R&D happens within the context of University research grants and NIH spending/coordination already. What comes out of the publicly-funded system is technology that private contributors then claim as patented technology for the next twenty years.
We already have a mechanism by which independent researchers can receive funding for and pursue the development of medical treatment for a host of ailments. The bottleneck is inevitably in the transition to mass production and distribution. We saw this shit back when Martin Shkreli became a household name, after buying up the patent for and ratcheting the price of Daraprim 13x.
You might also look at our continuous shortage of KN95 masks. This isn't cutting edge technology, and we've had an ongoing pandemic for over a year now, but we're still not generating masks fast enough to meet demand.
J&J is a totally different technology than Pfizer and moderna
What needed to happen was a suspension of patents and seizing facilities for non essential pharmaceuticals for retooling into vaccine factories. The government should’ve had facilities like this anyway mothballed or used for their own Medicare generics.
Medicare generics
I can already hear /r/neoliberal brains exploding into fountains of Supply/Demand graphs.
If a private enterprise can’t compete on the open market with what should be a public utility, then maybe that shouldn’t be a private enterprise.
How can our elite economic overlords afford the nose candy and teenage ass necessary to incentivize them to Make America Great Again with that kind of attitude?
I mean virtually all of these vaccines were completed by January of 2020. Everything since that has just been testing and producing the vaccines. The real bottleneck has been production, which should have been nationalized and gotten way more factories to do it.
Almost like capitalism is not designed nor able to handle catastrophe (or any mildly significant deviation from the status quo)
Reminder: The manhattan project was around 20-30 billion $ in todays money. This means that states could've payed for more than commercial companies invested (according to the Financial Times).
If mega- corporations couldnt make billions, then there would be no incentive to save human lives. Smh, obviously
If there was a government that was offering every scientist who worked on the project 10k sign on, cancel their student debt, and 60k for the year, they would have taken every single mega-corp out of business.
It reminds me of the soviet OKB model.
Okbuddyvirology and Okbuddyhealthcaresystem would have been extremely effective in this instance.
which makes you wonder what other diseases could have been cured right now if there was a state planned R&D model for medicine that issued lofty requirements and let drug design bureaus compete with each other to make the best product before a winner is selected and they all work together on manufacturing.
Reminds of how quickly we pivoted to mass producing effective medical countermeasures for Ebola, as soon as the US had its first domestic case.
Also... Jesus Christ, can you even imagine the US enduring an Ebola epidemic after the last two years of this shit.
Pouring one out for the millions of horseshoe crabs and sharks who have been killed for these vaccines
