The Last Pandemic In Human History

[Vitto]

So your biggest motive to not bother developing a vaccine, from the companies' point of view, is that someone else is going to do it first?

Uh, no! Right now they are in a frenzy do develope and market a vaccine because the demand is sky-high. They also got a lot of funds from governments to accelerate the process.
Regarding pharmaceutical in general companies invest if there is a valid return.
I know, pretty shitty when it regards healt but when you use pack of reagents that cost like a salary and bench equipment that can cost like an apartment you don't have much choice. And I don't want to talk about the cost of test on humans.

Okay, from everybody else's point of view, What's the downside here? If some people don't think they can win the race, that means there's a race. And a race has a winner.

And it doesn't even have to stop at one winner. If the winner of that race is charging too much, it may be cheaper for some nation or even some large corporation to develop it for themselves.

We already have a few "winners" in the race: AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer, more to come.
Right now is not a question of price, people want a vaccine and go back to a normal life and are very willing to pay for it. As I wrote above, companies got a lot of fund and permits to to the job ASAP.
The problem at the moment is production: vaccine plants, quite probably, were not big enough to support such a surge in demand and, as I wrote in the post before, creating more is expensive and require significant know-how, personal and permissions.

And finally, none of these are processes that are going to get more expensive as tech continues to advance. Costs of production tend to come down, not go up. We spent a decade and billions of dollars on the Human Genome Project, and it was worth it. But we can have our own genomes seqenced for a dozen bucks now.

The problem here is that processes can be easily be supplanted by better processes, which can be much better but not necessary cheaper. And we have a loooong way before the improvement of those processes hit a ceiling (e.g.: stem cells derived, fully functional organs, tha cost like 2-3 salary).
I learned it the hard way when I graduated and I had to throw in the garbage bin more or less all the techniques I learned on how to manipulate DNA because the CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit that has been develeped was a monster compared to them, we are talking 3-4 orders of magnitude in precision IIRC, so much that we are seriously considering gene editing in human patients affected by rare diseases.





I'd like to conclude that I'd really like that essential things like medicine to be developed and administrated by the state. Unfortunately I don't trust the capacity of many states to do things right, expecially when you have to push the limits in a field.