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To be fair, Johnson & Johnson (a US company) also made a similar pledge to AstraZeneca. These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion f

• flexie 6y ago
  Yes, the German/Turkish company that actually developed the Pfizer vaccine is heavily subsidized. For me it's mostly how it all ends up (simplified): European healthcare: Affordable, available to all and workable. Bad PR. American: Expensive, inaccessible except to the rich, and only slightly better. Great PR. The AstraZeneca vaccine also has 90 percent efficacy when used twice.
  • MagnumOpus 6y ago
    > The AstraZeneca vaccine also has 90 percent efficacy when used twice No it doesn't. Both dosings use two shots, and the "90%" number from the smaller dosing is from an unreliably small sample set of 33 infections -- it could easily be 70-80% by next month when more data comes in.
    • acqq 6y ago
      At the moment possibly wider error bars don’t come from just “33 infections” but more from possibly smaller number of those who received the observed treatment. The bars are to be calculated using conditional probabilities.
    • Jedd 6y ago
      > Both dosings use two shots, and the "90%" number from the smaller dosing is from an unreliably small sample set of 33 infections." Can you count infections as a metric of efficacy for a vaccine that's designed to stop infection? Consider [1]: "However, protection was 90% in an analysis of around 3,000 people on the trial who were given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose." AFAIK it's not known how many of those 3,000 in that trial were exposed to potential infection. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55040635 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55040635
    • bumby 6y ago
      Couldn’t the same be said in reverse? I.e., due to sampling error the reports could be amended to a 95% efficacy when more data comes in?
      • twoslide 6y ago
        I don't think we know based on public information. Some media report "up to 90%" which suggests the upper bound of the confidence interval, rather than the centre. Could also be a very wide CI, that overlaps with the standard dosage.
        • bumby 6y ago
          That's a fairer statement than the original which seemed biased towards only reporting the lower end of the interval without acknowledging the upper bound.
  • taejo 6y ago
    BioNTech is not a German/Turkish company. It's a German company, two of whose founders are of Turkish descent.
    • egeozcan 6y ago
      As someone who migrated to Germany from Turkey, people like me (and everything we are involved in) are "German" when we do something they're[0] not proud of, we are "Turkish" if we ever come close to success, and "of Turkish descent" in the normal times. Of course it depends who you are asking :) It's a bit annoying to be honest but not a huge deal. I suppose all immigrants have similar problems. [0]: I mean people living in Turkey
      • allendoerfer 6y ago
        I have read it‘s a bigger problem and a source for islamism, especially for the 2nd or 3rd generation of descendents of immigrants: When Germans still see you as Turkish, but Turks see you as German, it makes sense to a) be angry and b) search for some other identity.
      • dboreham 6y ago
        Same thing all over humanity: Scottish when losing the race, British when winning..
      • taejo 6y ago
        I didn't mean to make any judgment about the "Turkishness" or "Germanness" of Drs. Şahin and Türeci. I just mean to clarify that BioNTech was founded and is based in Germany, just as Google is an American company (not Russian-American) even though Sergey Brin was born in Moscow.
        • egeozcan 6y ago
          Sorry, I understood your intention, and you are completely right, mine was rather a rant that was just relevant.
      • 6y ago
  • IanDrake 6y ago
    Someone has never been to a doctors office or the hospital in the US or has a very loose definition of rich.
  • bumby 6y ago
    >Expensive, inaccessible except to the rich I don’t think the data bears this out exactly. US healthcare tends to optimize for access and quality to the detriment to cost. As the saying goes: access, quality, or cost... you only get to choose two. The US tends to measure better than any comparable country of its size on those two metrics (and quite poorly on cost...but some of that is because the US funds about 50% of worldwide medical R&D) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673617308188 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361... Edit: U.S. percentage of worldwide R&D has been waning and, while still the largest contributor, is now a little over 40% https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • coliveira 6y ago
      The US healthcare is good only when considering those who can pay to access it. But since large swathes of the US population cannot afford to have access (expensive insurance costs, even with Obamacare support), this becomes a mute point. If that is the metric, then even Brazil (and many other 3rd word countries) also has good medical care, because it works for the small percent of the population with money to access it. And in fact this is one of the big differentiators between 1st world and 3rd world countries: if the population has access to quality services, in health care or other important areas like education and sanitation. The US seems to be designing its systems to become a big 3rd world country.
      • bumby 6y ago
        Your points are baked into the data that I linked. The metric within is "HAQ Index" which stands for "Healthcare Access and Quality". I.e., access is part of the measure. In the US everybody has access, which is part of the problem that drives costs higher. E.g., if you don't have insurance you can walk into an emergency room and get treated even if it's not an emergent situation. If you don't have insurance, there is a higher risk you won't pay. That cost then gets spread to others who do.
• Frost1x 6y ago
  >These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they So where did Pfizer's capital come from to shoulder these costs? It didn't come out of thin air, they've accumulated capital from somewhere. If not from taxpayers, someone is subsidizing Pfizer's expenses through Pfizer's revenue stream. Taxpayer subsidies really make sense here seeing how this issue effects everyone.
  • jefftk 6y ago
    > someone is subsidizing Pfizer's expenses through Pfizer's revenue stream Companies taking a portion of what they earn from their existing products and investing this money to create new products is beneficial, and we should have more of it. Additionally, while this is probably not the case for Pfizer, another possibility is that a company can take outside investment to fund development of a new product.
    • paganel 6y ago
      Not the OP, but what she/he is probably hinting at is that the majority of Western Governments (i.e. both the US and the EU) have poured trillions of dollars/euros into the market as the pandemic started, money that has helped the capital markets stay afloat (and even more than that). Without those trillions of dollars/euros most probably the capital markets would have been down by at least 50% (my guesstimate, or at least that's where we were headed mid-March), which means that the money available to companies like Pfizer would have been a lot less. As such, Pfizer saying that they didn't receive federal money is technically correct, but without federal money most probably their market value would have been a lot less right now.
      • bumby 6y ago
        Can you help me understand your point a little better? I think the OP was reflecting on cash flow being used for R&D but your post seems to be more about market capitalization.