We are talking about a company providing a service. They might not have invented the vaccine but they are providing the means to bring it from proof of concept into mass production. The commenter seemed to think that this isn't worth money.
It's not an "argument" per se, as in whether we should or shouldn't pay the pharma companies. Of course we should pay pharma for this for COVID, and of course it is "worth it." There is no argument (from me at least) about that tactical decision.
My larger point is that for-profit pharma/healthcare is not a healthy marketplace (... or at best, it's an immature one). In the not-so-distant past (in America, up until the Civil War or thereabouts), firefighting was mostly privatized (meaning not government-run) [0], and brigades would compete (literally sometimes fighting in the streets, covering the hydrant to impede rival brigades, etc.) to claim the prize of the insurance payout for saving a building [1], which doesn't really serve the interests of the victims of fires.
I think the incentives of for-profit firefighters are not all that dissimilar from the incentives of modern pharma companies today (i.e. pay us to save your building from this fire, vs pay us to research this vaccine), and I would hope to evolve this pharma industry and this marketplace (of "demand" for life/health, vs "supply" of pharma research and resources) into something more mature and with fewer perverse incentives in the long-run.
I was not familiar with the history of firefighting until now and this is pretty wild. Thank you for clarifying what you meant with your earlier comment. I agree that for-profit healthcare and pharma is a huge problem, exactly because of the misaligned incentives for companies and patients.
The question is not if it’s valuable, the question is if it’s subsided. Farmers producing corn add some value to the process, but in western countries ~100% of their profits are from government subsidies. This does incentivize them to be more efficient, but it also means their constantly looking for a larger handout.
In the case of farm subsidies it’s grown to the point of being actively unhealthy both in economic terms and the actual root cause of the obesity epidemic. Without sufficient calories you can’t have an obese population due to physics. Medical subsidies have resulted in a host of related problems not just in economic costs, but also in what research gets done and how efficient that is.
The cost of Medical studies in the US has grown wildly out of proportion because their a profit center. This perversely slows down the rate of medical research, even in the case of emergencies like covid 19.
You don’t get a significant percentage of the population to obese in a famine. Simply maintaining obesity across over 40% of the population takes a lot of energy, let alone morbid obesity numbers.
Yes you certainly can. Famines are not spread equally. The people that can afford to have food shipped in (i.e. anyone who can afford to order things on Amazon) could comfortably remain fat while the entire lower class in their local area suffered from a famine.
Having food shipped in still requires it to be created somewhere to be shipped out.
It’s very possible for some percentage of the population to starve even during a food surplus, but starving people will bid up the cost of food to the point where you can’t get a 40% of the population to have a surplus in a famine in any society that we know about.
Here is the official definition for the minimum to qualify as a famine:
“At least 20% of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope
The prevalence of acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30%
The death rate exceeds two people per 10,000 people per day“
That’s killing off over 7% of the population per year.
citation? That seems very unlikely. US farmers constantly look for greater efficiencies. They are also among the most conservative about land policy i.e. erosion, chemical application etc because it costs them money.
On average your looking at ~90B in net profits from farming, the subsidies however are much harder to track down. Ethanol subsides for example are often excluded as are insurance, tariffs etc.
Ahh, no it simply wasn’t clear what you where asking about.
There are a lot of ways to slice this up. “Overall agricultural subsidies in 2010 were estimated at $172 billion by a European agricultural industry association; however, the majority of this estimate consists of food stamps and other consumer subsidies, so it is not comparable to the 2005 estimate.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
One example of this is Americans for example pay 3 billion dollars more for sugar than international market rates. But, only a fraction of that directly ends up in farmers pockets. You can either take the full 3 billion as a government subsidy or exclude most of it. Similarly, propaganda and what’s allowed in food lunch programs gets tricky.
So, I am not endorsing any specific estimate, just saying the total industry profits are approximately the same as the total subsidy. Add up just direct federal subsidies gets you lower numbers especially if you try an exclude state, ethanol, R&D, loans, Education, tax breaks, and other less obvious handouts.
PS: Silly me, I forgot about all the little exceptions in environmental, immigration, labor laws, use of federal lands, etc.
We are talking about a company providing a service. They might not have invented the vaccine but they are providing the means to bring it from proof of concept into mass production. The commenter seemed to think that this isn't worth money.
I argue that you get quite a bang for the buck.