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Pfizer, Moderna seen reaping billions from Covid-19 vaccine booster market
- ethagknight 5y agoAnd if it were easy, everyone would be doing it
- pmdulaney 5y agoAnd saving tens or hundreds of thousands of lives...
- ipspam 5y ago$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.
- morpheos137 5y agoThe 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. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-age-penalty-11592003287 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-age-penalty-115920032...
- neurotrace 5y agoDeath 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.
- rdtwo 5y agoJust think of the healthcare Costs that will eventually have to be paid by Medicare and Medicaid for hospital visits and it’s a steal
- guidovranken 5y agoYou can take all the shots you want but you'll never be able to move forward with your life.
- macintux 5y agoAs 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"?
- loopz 5y agoIt'd just skyrocket until people took it seriously and locked down even more. We saw that in Italy 2020 and now in India, Brazil.
- morpheos137 5y agoIs there compelling evidence that "lockdowns" in the west actually had a significant impact on the spread?
- macintux 5y agoNot a scientist, but again the fact that we nearly eliminated the flu through our countermeasures strikes me as strong circumstantial evidence. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
- morpheos137 5y agoI 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.
- macintux 5y agoPediatric deaths were down from 199 to 1. Admittedly the 199 was a peak, but still that’s an impressive drop. Even if we assume last year was traumatic enough that things got missed, it seems evident that the flu took it on the chin.
- mdbug 5y agoThe 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.
- rualca 5y ago> 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?
- mdbug 5y agoThe 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.
- rualca 5y ago> 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.
- refurb 5y agoA 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..
- throwaway4220 5y agoIs it just me or are Reuters headlines more clickbaity from a decade ago
- pphysch 5y agoThey just recently changed to a limited paywall model.
- ppeetteerr 5y agoYeah, 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.
- forz877 5y agoIt'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.
- dubbed 5y agoMedicine 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.
- jjeaff 5y agoSounds kind of like software.
- carrychains 5y agoSounds like literally every living system.
- rualca 5y ago> Medicine is the only industry that can sell flawed products, offer no guarantees, and charge arbitrary prices for services without any consequence. Where do you frame mandatory requirements for clinical trials along with your personal assertion regarding "flawed products with no guarantees" ?
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- poof131 5y agoWhat 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. 1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/bidens-failure-on-covid-vaccine-monopolies https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/bidens-failure-on-covid-v...
- loopz 5y agoCapitalism doesn't work that way for health. It's only too predictable now.
- rualca 5y agoTo 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.
- BurningFrog 5y agoForcing 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.
- rank0 5y agoI actually have no problem with pharma companies seeing huge profits from the covid vaccines. Should they not be compensated for their extremely difficult/impactful work? Why won’t someone else do it for cheaper?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- least 5y agoRegulatory capture and patent laws are pretty big inhibitors to competing with massive pharmaceutical companies generally speaking.
- elevenoh 5y agoAnd the insider-friendly FDA process.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoBig phrama and their lobbyists will have more money now to influence policy.
- gurleen_s 5y agoThat money will be largely going to executives and shareholders, people who had very little hand in the science.
- guidovranken 5y agoI'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.
- foepys 5y agoDid 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.
- mbg721 5y agoThere's tons of money to be made interpreting Pharaoh's dreams too, until the year the crops go bad.
- dbcooper 5y agoGood. They've created massive value.
- elevenoh 5y agoI'm sure there's no malignment of interests between these corps & taxpayers.. /s
- seoaeu 5y agoTaxpayers 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
- oxplot 5y agoI don't know if their claim of extra protection is valid or valid to the claimed extent, but if so, it's well deserved and this is BS news.