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Funny. I doubt the horsehoe crab population being decimated at an industrial scale when a synthetic alternative was available, but langishing unapproved would agree.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/covid-vac...

3+ different vaccine production lines. 1 species as a supply bottleneck, and no one giving a damn that there needs be affordances made to not potentially drive a species to extinction.

I'm normally not big on environmentalist concerns as a first order thing because it tends to get you tuned out in some circles but the scale becomes absolutely impossible to ignore in this case.

Then you had other potential routes for treatment completely ignored due to the fact they're biologics and cannot be patented. Echinaecia purpurea among them. (Came in handy for me early on), and vitamin C to keep immune cell exhaustion at bay.

No one ever heard about or researched any of it, nor was anyone comfortable bringing it up lest one get dog-piled as a "disinfo-spreading quack". Gotta wait for Big Pharma to bail you out doncha'know?

The entire thing has just been one massive shitshow. It's a Catch-22. There's no way to define anything as medically sound except to have a company go balls-to-the-wall double-blind cert study, but no one will do that for something that can't be patented or have an industrial business model built around it.

The externalities are a bit on the extreme side in my view.




Americans really do get the short end of the stick. Having to pay full whack to fund healthcare development while single payer systems just take the result at bargain basement prices.

The only solution is to fund basic science research directly and remove the perverse incentives, but (as an outsider) it seems America does not have the political will to do anything so bold right now.


There is some slow movement in that direction, but there is a lot of opaqueness that has to be worked through and have public scrutiny turned it's way.

At the end of the day though, no matter how you slice the pie of dollars, the motivation of a majority of the market is to make more money. Not to solve problems one and done. Always remember, healthcare is an industry first and foremost; cures aren't good business. Just look at what Wall Street has to say on the matter.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/04/14/0059236/is-curin...

So Market mechanisms don't really work unless you structure things correctly; which includes building a prize pool to pull from for each actor to further the state of the art. Try doing that in the U.S. and people will get all bent though because all that capital ends up locked away instead of lining everyone's pockets..


"The only solution is to fund basic science research directly"

Which country would do the funding?


Preferably, all of them. More selfishly, funding basic science has economic advantages (plus you get to keep the smart people).




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