8 ms·

Hmm, I guess my instinct is just the opposite, it's shocking that anyone in the world should be denied the information needed to produce their own vaccines. Eve

Hmm, I guess my instinct is just the opposite, it's shocking that anyone in the world should be denied the information needed to produce their own vaccines. Even without the larger discussion of IP, is there any doubt that Moderna and Pfizer have recouped their costs many, many times over already?

creato 5y ago
How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed? The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 5y ago
  I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - darkarmani 5y ago
    We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward? You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.
      - creato 5y ago
        > This was all financed with government money. Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).
- burkaman 5y ago
  Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.
  - JoshuaDavid 5y ago
    > If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives". COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense. What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions". [1] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk
gp 5y ago
Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive. When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit? - IP for the best vaccines, vs worse ones otherwise available, so we are all healthier - Higher yielding crop seeds, vs worse lineages, so that we can all eat better - Efficient water purification techniques, so that we all have clean water cheaper - Metallurgy for high performance alloys used in turbines and aircraft structures, so that we can all build safer airplanes for less - Software to detect early cancer or heart disease from blood markers, so that we can prevent disease Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things
- clairity 5y ago
  > “Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things” that’s a fairytale we’re told to keep things the way they are. every single person on earth has passions to do and create every day. that’s literally built into the biophysics of the universe. the profit motive shapes where we collectively apply our natural motivations, it doesn’t create the motivations themselves. we will always be building better things, it’s just a question of which better things. none of your list strictly requires a profit motive to have curious minds explore them.
  - seabird 5y ago
    I don't think it's wise to create an environment where medical advancements are gated behind there being enough people in the world that are passionate about pencil-pushing and dealing with the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Plenty of people go to work and get the bricks beat off them for 8 hours a day only because they get a sizable paycheck that they can then spend on things they're actually passionate about.
    - clairity 5y ago
      that’s a less than good-faith interpretation of the point i made, which is that, to the first order, people are intrinsically motivated to explore, experiment, and create. that doesn’t preclude the existence or usefulness of extrinsic motivation (e.g., wages), or even the negative effects of bureaucratic gatekeeping.
maxerickson 5y ago
Denied is doing a lot of work there. What if there are 3 people with the knowledge and skills to successfully setup part of the production process. Should their time be made available to anyone that asks for it?
bpodgursky 5y ago
Biotech investing has 50 misses for every hit. You don't have to recoup the cost of this particular investment, you have to recoup the costs that went into all the gambles that didn't pay off. (unless you want that investor money to go into some stupid smartphone game instead, which is absolutely what will happen if you destroy the profitability of breakthrough vaccine improvements)
input_sh 5y ago
Well technically, US was in favour of abolishing IP and Germany was opposed to it a few months back. But if you scratch under the surface a bit, the point they deviated on isn't really "should IP of a vaccine be a thing", but more "should Pfizer keep all the profit, or should BioNTech get some of it". Because even if, say, my country made a perfect copy of a Pfizer vaccine, EMA/FDA could still put it in an unfavourable position if you're interested in traveling to the EU/USA any time soon. EU did just that with AZ vaccines manufactured in India (not recognizing it while recognizing AZ vaccine not made in India).
robocat 5y ago
> is there any doubt that Moderna and Pfizer have recouped their costs many, many times over already? For VC you need to get ~30x return from one company invested in to break even. Assumptions: 1 in 10 investments successful, 10 years, 12% per annum return needed by investors to cover variance (between returns of their different VC investments - risk vs reward). https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me-the-truth-about-vcs/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me... I am guessing that greenfield pharmaceuticals is a more risky investment than tech VC, so perhaps a 50x return is fair. In a situation where there is massive consumer surplus (years of life), then an even higher multiple is probably fair. Most people just don’t understand how much return is necessary to cover the high risk of failure. Of course, if they were mostly funded by government with no-strings-attached money, or the expected timeframe to success was very short, then the expected returns look a bit different. Disclaimer: I hate big pharma as much as the next guy, but I try to think rationally. Edit: anyone have a link to a calculation of consumer surplus in $ for the vaccination? To avoid a 1:10 chance of losing IQ (brain fog) or my sense of smell or a 1:1000 chance of death, I would expect that to be worth a lot to me.

creato 5y ago

How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed? The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 5y ago
I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.
thatguy0900 5y ago
At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- darkarmani 5y ago
  We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward? You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.
    - creato 5y ago
      > This was all financed with government money. Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).
burkaman 5y ago
Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago
  > If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives". COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense. What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions". [1] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk

gp 5y ago

Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive. When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit? - IP for the best vaccines, vs worse ones otherwise available, so we are all healthier - Higher yielding crop seeds, vs worse lineages, so that we can all eat better - Efficient water purification techniques, so that we all have clean water cheaper - Metallurgy for high performance alloys used in turbines and aircraft structures, so that we can all build safer airplanes for less - Software to detect early cancer or heart disease from blood markers, so that we can prevent disease Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things

clairity 5y ago
> “Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things” that’s a fairytale we’re told to keep things the way they are. every single person on earth has passions to do and create every day. that’s literally built into the biophysics of the universe. the profit motive shapes where we collectively apply our natural motivations, it doesn’t create the motivations themselves. we will always be building better things, it’s just a question of which better things. none of your list strictly requires a profit motive to have curious minds explore them.
- seabird 5y ago
  I don't think it's wise to create an environment where medical advancements are gated behind there being enough people in the world that are passionate about pencil-pushing and dealing with the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Plenty of people go to work and get the bricks beat off them for 8 hours a day only because they get a sizable paycheck that they can then spend on things they're actually passionate about.
  - clairity 5y ago
    that’s a less than good-faith interpretation of the point i made, which is that, to the first order, people are intrinsically motivated to explore, experiment, and create. that doesn’t preclude the existence or usefulness of extrinsic motivation (e.g., wages), or even the negative effects of bureaucratic gatekeeping.

maxerickson 5y ago

Denied is doing a lot of work there. What if there are 3 people with the knowledge and skills to successfully setup part of the production process. Should their time be made available to anyone that asks for it?

bpodgursky 5y ago

Biotech investing has 50 misses for every hit. You don't have to recoup the cost of this particular investment, you have to recoup the costs that went into all the gambles that didn't pay off. (unless you want that investor money to go into some stupid smartphone game instead, which is absolutely what will happen if you destroy the profitability of breakthrough vaccine improvements)

input_sh 5y ago

Well technically, US was in favour of abolishing IP and Germany was opposed to it a few months back. But if you scratch under the surface a bit, the point they deviated on isn't really "should IP of a vaccine be a thing", but more "should Pfizer keep all the profit, or should BioNTech get some of it". Because even if, say, my country made a perfect copy of a Pfizer vaccine, EMA/FDA could still put it in an unfavourable position if you're interested in traveling to the EU/USA any time soon. EU did just that with AZ vaccines manufactured in India (not recognizing it while recognizing AZ vaccine not made in India).

robocat 5y ago

> is there any doubt that Moderna and Pfizer have recouped their costs many, many times over already? For VC you need to get ~30x return from one company invested in to break even. Assumptions: 1 in 10 investments successful, 10 years, 12% per annum return needed by investors to cover variance (between returns of their different VC investments - risk vs reward). https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me-the-truth-about-vcs/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me... I am guessing that greenfield pharmaceuticals is a more risky investment than tech VC, so perhaps a 50x return is fair. In a situation where there is massive consumer surplus (years of life), then an even higher multiple is probably fair. Most people just don’t understand how much return is necessary to cover the high risk of failure. Of course, if they were mostly funded by government with no-strings-attached money, or the expected timeframe to success was very short, then the expected returns look a bit different. Disclaimer: I hate big pharma as much as the next guy, but I try to think rationally. Edit: anyone have a link to a calculation of consumer surplus in $ for the vaccination? To avoid a 1:10 chance of losing IQ (brain fog) or my sense of smell or a 1:1000 chance of death, I would expect that to be worth a lot to me.