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Oof market value for a covid vaccine sounds like an absolutely brutal world to live in.

by soared 6y ago

xyzzyz 6y ago
Why? First doses go to highest bidders, which might as well be government, or it might wait a while until more doses are available and the bids get lower. The point here is to incentivize the vaccine manufacturers to race against one another, to produce as many doses as quickly as possible, in order to take advantage of the early high bidders. Instead, the current arrangement, where the governments claim first dibs on hundreds of millions of doses, while paying relative peanuts compared to the insane amounts of value those vaccines could produce, do very little to incentivize the companies to spare no expense to accelerate the production. Once they satisfy the obligations they have with governments, remaining buyers won't want to pay much either, so why bother?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  In Seattle, the going price for a vaccine was $10,000, which of course created quite a scandal. But I bet if this were legal, the vaccine companies would find overnight ways to produce more vaccines. Instead, we have severe shortages. Shortages and gluts always happen when the government tries altruism instead of practicality.
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    Both manufacturers and legislators are going to be thinking about their future prospects as well as present prospects. In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it." I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      In that case, maybe the media and academia could use its narrative making power to convince people to believe in and repeat something useful. They clearly are able to promote falsehoods or unsubstantiated wishful thinking to the level of widely accepted truths with institutional backing, if needed. Maybe they should then convince people that incentivizing companies to make vaccines exactly when they are most needed is a good thing. That it's true should make it easier job than it usually is.

Oof market value for a covid vaccine sounds like an absolutely brutal world to live in.

by soared 6y ago

Oof market value for a covid vaccine sounds like an absolutely brutal world to live in.

Why? First doses go to highest bidders, which might as well be government, or it might wait a while until more doses are available and the bids get lower. The point here is to incentivize the vaccine manufacturers to race against one another, to produce as many doses as quickly as possible, in order to take advantage of the early high bidders. Instead, the current arrangement, where the governments claim first dibs on hundreds of millions of doses, while paying relative peanuts compared to the insane amounts of value those vaccines could produce, do very little to incentivize the companies to spare no expense to accelerate the production. Once they satisfy the obligations they have with governments, remaining buyers won't want to pay much either, so why bother?

WalterBright 6y ago
In Seattle, the going price for a vaccine was $10,000, which of course created quite a scandal. But I bet if this were legal, the vaccine companies would find overnight ways to produce more vaccines. Instead, we have severe shortages. Shortages and gluts always happen when the government tries altruism instead of practicality.
- philipkglass 6y ago
  Both manufacturers and legislators are going to be thinking about their future prospects as well as present prospects. In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it." I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    In that case, maybe the media and academia could use its narrative making power to convince people to believe in and repeat something useful. They clearly are able to promote falsehoods or unsubstantiated wishful thinking to the level of widely accepted truths with institutional backing, if needed. Maybe they should then convince people that incentivizing companies to make vaccines exactly when they are most needed is a good thing. That it's true should make it easier job than it usually is.