NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).
I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.
Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.
In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.
The amount of scrutiny on Wuhan has been astronomical and they actually proved last year it was one of a handful of wild animals as the source of Covid-19. The infections started and were initially concentrated in the market, not the lab.
The Wuhan lab is a convenient conspiracy theory distraction. mRNA vaccines are miracle and I've been saying this from day one...
If any virus were to start kill kids, you'd all be lined up in milliseconds for the vaccine.
We got extremely lucky that Covid-19 left children out of its attack vector.
The next pandemic may not be so gracious.
The Spanish Flu in 1917-18 killed young and old in its first wave. Then the second wave it also took out 25-35yo adults. And if you got it, you were dead in 48 hours.
You people don't actually read anything and know nothing about why the CDC and Fauci acted as they did. They were expecting another Spanish Flu, and they got something very different. Different incubation time. Different attack vector. But they adapted and saved lives.
You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
You know every single Republican was vaccinated as soon as they got the chance. They just forgot to tell you.
> You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
As a non-US person - I don't understand this. Didn't all the locking down happen state by state anyway? He didn't stop anyone locking down, from what I understood? And he allocated $18bn to finding and distributing a vaccine for Covid[0]?
When meat packing plants slowed down, their owners started losing money and complained to the government, who granted them waivers to open. Workers there of course caught covid and spread it to their families.
They also pushed schools to open sooner on the basis that children were not as affected, but they caused teachers and staff to become infected and die.
Trump put his dilletante son-in-law in charge of the logistic effort to distribute equipment, and Jared went on to recruit his rich buddies on the task for instead of experts, prompting Jack Kennedy's grandson of all people to blow the whistle, wondering why they were in charge of this monumental task instead of you know... experts.
One thing they did was take equipment from states that needed it and redirect it to states that were loyal to Trump but didn't need the equipment.
They also seized equipment purchased by states at airports, to the point states had to meet planes on the tarmac and escort the equipment to hospitals with state police.
The end result is that the US had one of the worst pandemic responses in the early days, and today we have the distinction as the country with the most covid deaths (over 1 million) as well as having an absurdly high death rate compared to peer nations.
