This isn't responding to the OP's point, which was that war profiteering (making money by providing weapons to kill people) is morally different from selling vaccines (making money by providing medicines to save people's lives).

I'm very familiar with the perverse outcomes that emanate from profit-driven medical research, having been personally affected by illnesses that the mainstream medical science community sees no incentive to invest in.

But the reasons and ethics of the system being the way it is are separate from the reality of what it is for the purposes of getting things done in the here and now.

For better or worse, as things stand right now, pharmaceutical companies, like other companies, need to make profits - or at the very least avoid crippling losses - in order to survive and continue doing their work.

That includes covering the formidable costs of the many research studies that go nowhere and yield no revenues.

I'm sure you wouldn't find a single person in a pharmaceutical company who would feel good about withholding treatment from any person with a life threatening illness. But what they also have to care about is remaining in business so they can treat and cure many more people with serious illnesses.