Security quote of the week [LWN.net]

And, of course, this kind of thing wouldn't be complete without a bogus claim of the great innovation incentive that patents bring.
Finally, the suspension of vaccine-related IP rights fundamentally undermines the global innovation regime that brought us these miraculous drugs in the first place — wildly effective vaccines developed in absolute record time.
That's bullshit. The incentive to produce these vaccines was not patents, but saving the damn world. Second, the first of those vaccines, from Moderna, was developed in just two days because Chinese researchers uploaded the details of the coronavirus and made it openly available to researchers, rather than locking it up. In other words, it wasn't locking down information with patents that got us this vaccine, it was the opposite.

— Mike Masnick

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Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 1:11 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (13 responses)

A) this isn’t security…?
B) this post assumes that literally the only thing required to develop the vaccine was a “desire to save the world”

Readers here know that Moderna has literally *billions and billions* of dollars sunk in to R&D to make this possible, right? And without patents they couldn’t recover that cost and so they would not have spent the money.

Patents don’t seem to work well for software, where a better equivalent is copyright. On the other hand, they are absolutely essential to the functioning of the drug industry.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:56 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I am more secure having been vaccinated.

The $billions put in were to build out production capacity. Anybody producing at such a rate would spend the same, and charge accordingly,.patent or no. The inventor does not get those $billions.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 12:44 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (11 responses)

> Patents don’t seem to work well for software, where a better equivalent is copyright. On the other hand, they are absolutely essential to the functioning of the drug industry.

Patents don't seem to work well for *customers* of the drug industry - spoken by someone who knows a bit about it!

Why are there no cures for diseases that kill in the third world? Why are *effective* non-patented drugs forgotten about (aspirin for heart disease was forgotten until recently). Why is it difficult to get hold of non-patented drugs for most common western ailments?

The list goes on.

On the other hand, patents work great for helping the drug industry churn out minor spins on old drugs, and for keeping profits high. HINT - *very* *little* real drug research is funded by "Big Pharma". It's funded by charities, governments, and small start-ups. Big Pharma just hoover it all up once the big money has been sunk.

Case in point, the Covid-19 vaccines that mimic the virus (the majority of vaccines) are all based on research done by a lone researcher who pretty much bankrupted themself trying to fund it while nobody else was interested. I believe that was done 20 years or so ago, so that today we can engineer a safe vaccine in months. Without that research, we probably STILL wouldn't have any really effective vaccines.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 8:08 UTC (Fri) by mpg (subscriber, #70797) [Link] (10 responses)

> Case in point, the Covid-19 vaccines that mimic the virus (the majority of vaccines) are all based on research done by a lone researcher who pretty much bankrupted themself trying to fund it while nobody else was interested.

That's the first time I'm hearing about that. Could you share more details (or pointers to sources with more details)? Thanks in advance.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 11:58 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (6 responses)

That claim sounds fishy given that the most successful COVID-19 vaccines don't “mimic the virus”, they contain mRNA that codes only for a specific component of the virus (the spike protein). The vaccine recipient's cells then actually manufacture that protein and that elicits an immune response.

Traditional vaccines often contain attenuated or deactivated versions of the actual virus they're supposed to immunise against, which could be construed as “mimicking the virus”. Unlike these, mRNA vaccines don't come with any part of the virus in question, which makes them inherently safer than some of the traditional vaccines. For example, there were (very rare) cases of the attenuated virus in the Sabin (oral) polio vaccine mutating back into active form and giving vaccine recipients polio; with the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that can't happen because they don't contain any viral material that could even conceivably cause an infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 13:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

As usual I'm hazy on the details ... sorry ...

But it could be the manufactured RNA vaccines. Whatever, it's the technology that manufactures the vaccine's active agent.

A lone researcher (Iirc, it was a woman, too, they always get written out of history) spent about five years and all of her money trying to get grants to prove the concept was workable. Finally managed to get a sponsor once it looked viable.

Then a good few more years. If it hadn't been for that, regulatory approval for the vaccines would have been *MUCH* harder, because these vaccines are all 90% well proven vaccine carrier, and 10% artificial active ingredient. Otherwise there'd have been much more risk - is the active ingredient going to stay dead, is it contaminated, is is is ...

And it's why they say they'll be able to roll out new vaccines with minimal testing - all they are is minor changes to the active ingredient.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 14:29 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

The idea of mRNA-based vaccines is almost as old as the discovery of mRNA itself. It's certainly something that various academic research groups and pharmaceutical companies have been spending considerable amounts of time and money on over the years. For example, BioNTech, the German company behind the “Pfizer vaccine” was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy (and prevention); in early 2020, they basically put what they'd been doing on hold to apply their pre-existing vaccine technology to SARS-CoV-2. (I've read somewhere that once they'd received the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it took BioNTech two days to come up with a number of likely vaccine candidates, and the rest of the time was spent on picking the best of those, pre-clinical and clinical testing, and getting regulatory approval.) They're back to working on the anti-cancer stuff now, too, and thanks to their COVID vaccine efforts, funding for that is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:08 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy

ie after this lady near bankrupted herself.

Not to downplay what BioNTech have done (I think my mum invested in them), but they were building on earlier research.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2021 10:12 UTC (Sun) by gezza (subscriber, #40700) [Link] (1 responses)

See Sam's link below. Turns out that BioNTech licensed the tech from with Katalin Karikó and later recruited her. Interesting read.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 14:13 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

People who believe that Katalin Karikó hasn't been getting the credit due to her will be pleased to hear that in 2022, she, along with her BioNTech colleagues Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci will be awarded the Paul-Ehrlich-und-Ludwig-Darmstaedter-Preis (the most prestigious prize for medical research in Germany) for their work on mRNA technology. The awards committee explicitly cited their basic research rather than their work on the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine. Various recipients of this award have gone on to win the Nobel prize for medicine, too, so that's not entirely out of the question, either.

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 8, 2021 15:59 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

[mRNA vaccines]

> Then a good few more years. If it hadn't been for that, regulatory approval for the vaccines would have been *MUCH* harder, because these vaccines are all 90% well proven vaccine carrier, and 10% artificial active ingredient. Otherwise there'd have been much more risk - is the active ingredient going to stay dead, is it contaminated, is is is ...

This bears no resemblance to anything I know about mRNA vaccines, which are composed of a lipid coat (a somewhat unusual one, formulated for this purpose) and cunningly modified viral mRNA (only a small part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome), and nothing else. It's impossible for the active ingredient to not "stay dead", although -- as with viruses -- it's a bit hard to define mRNA as either dead or alive. (I prefer to think of viruses as things that are dead outside a cell and alive inside it). It's impossible for it to cause disease. It's definitely impossible for it to revert to being harmful and I've not heard of any regulatory concern over that (only over whether the mRNA protein product or its packaging is *itself* harmful, say, inducing allergic shock or interacting negatively with something else already in the body; a worry with every new medication of any kind).

Even if it's given to someone who's already infected with SARS-CoV-2, the most it'll do is add a tiny bit more spike protein to the huge amounts that the virus is already producing: there's no danger of recombination or anything making the thing dangerous, which is a *definite* risk with attenuated- or dead-virus formulations like some polio vaccines.

(Contamination is a problem, but not one that has anything to do with anything that Katalin Karikó did: she was involved with pseudouridination, which is a change to the *mRNA itself* and has nothing to do with contaminants.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 22:43 UTC (Fri) by sam.thursfield (subscriber, #94496) [Link] (2 responses)

Perhaps this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-...

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2021 19:39 UTC (Sat) by mpg (subscriber, #70797) [Link]

Thanks for the reference, that was an interesting read! Som she was the person who discovered the trick with the modified U base. (I first heard about this trick here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-sou... and as the blog post points out, the similarity with computer security is striking. I find it amazing that this works with our bodies too.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2021 9:32 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm not sure that was the exact article - in particular I don't remember the link to Moderna and BioNTech, but if it wasn't it was almost certainly a summary of that article ...

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 3:54 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Second, the first of those vaccines, from Moderna, was developed in just two days because Chinese researchers uploaded the details of the coronavirus

Without those samples the vaccine would have been "developed" a couple of days later.

And right now the vaccine production constraints are not due to IP. They're due to production bottlenecks that simply can't be fixed within the next months.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:01 UTC (Thu) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (26 responses)

Hell yeah, preach. Medical patents are modern war profiteering and among the lowest evils known to modern society. The global capitalist death machine must have its profits.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:31 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (25 responses)

Have you ever actually worked in medical chemistry or an associated area?

I would bet $10000 that you have not.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:37 UTC (Thu) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (23 responses)

Ah, of course the only checks and balances on medical research should be from medical researchers, and anyone without a degree and background experience in medical chemistry is not entitled to an opinion on the matter, despite the fact that it concerns matters of life and death which broadly affects the entire world population.

Since you seem to be one such expert we can all sit back quietly and listen to your mental arithmetic to justify the assertion that you are not, in fact, a merchant of death, and we can all take your sermon forth and preach it in the comment section of any other article we happen to find about medical research and IP.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:47 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (22 responses)

> Ah, of course the only checks and balances on medical research should be from medical researchers, and anyone without a degree and background experience in medical chemistry is not entitled to an opinion on the matter

That is pretty much correct. You have no knowledge of the field, yet do not hesitate to make proclamations demanding its complete restructuring.

> despite the fact that it concerns matters of life and death which broadly affects the entire world population.

Indeed. And right now the capitalistic murder machine is the one that is actually delivering working drugs.

The reality is that drug development right now takes around $5 billion (yes, that is FIVE BILLION) dollars to develop a new drug. Mostly because of the cost of the failed attempts. Drug R&D has around 90% failure rate in clinical trials, quite a bit of them in the Phase 3 trials (the most expensive ones).

Oh, and this number is growing. People in the field call it "The Eroom Law" - Moore's Law in reverse, where each step takes two times longer and takes 1.5 times more money.

If we look at Moderna, they burned through about $5B of investors' money over almost a decade to develop the RNA vaccine. I don't know about BioNTech/Pfizer, but I'd be surprised if the numbers are different.

Do you propose to just expropriate all the resulting research? Who then will risk their money to fund the next Moderna?

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 6:53 UTC (Thu) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (18 responses)

I don't deny that it costs money, and lots of it. But where does it come from? It's not an R&D investment from the companies seeking to make a return. It's a tax on the public coffers. The COVID-19 vaccines received over $12B in public funds via Operation Warp Speed, significantly more than your $5B napkin figure. Why should a private company receive the patent and profits when the public made the investment? The research *is* being appropriated, but it's NOT being done by the public. It's being done by private profiteers.

All medical R&D should be funded by the public, and the results made available to the public at no cost. Applying the profit motive and capitalist incentives to public health is *evil*.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 7:54 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (13 responses)

> It's not an R&D investment from the companies seeking to make a return

It is. Pharma companies have the largest R&D percentage among ALL industries: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126#_idTextAnchor003 - see figure 1. They have even edged out semiconductor manufacturing.

> The COVID-19 vaccines received over $12B in public funds via Operation Warp Speed, significantly more than your $5B napkin figure.

Yet without these $5B there wouldn't be anything to spend this $12B on. Moderna and BioNTech worked for a decade on R&D for these vaccines.

You should also understand that in case of Moderna these $5B were spent by people and companies who have seen most of their other investments in pharma fail (90%+ failure rate!). So they _need_ massive returns on at least _some_ of investments to break even.

> Why should a private company receive the patent and profits when the public made the investment?

Because the public has NOT made an investment. Investment assumes risk, and the public simply bought fully developed vaccines. It was private investors who put their money at risk and funded the development.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 8:24 UTC (Thu) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (3 responses)

>It is. Pharma companies have the largest R&D percentage among ALL industries.

I understand that R&D is the greatest cost in medicine, that's not the question. The question is where the money comes from. Private companies put up a lot, but the public puts up much more - so why should the company be given the sole right to exploit the public's health and well being with the results? These companies take the artificial monopoly granted by patents and then extort the public in a non-competitive market - the demand has no choice but to buy! Capitalism cannot work here.

I don't buy it, not one bit, but if we assume that what you say is true: is it just or moral? Hell no! The system should be torn down with prejudice, the patents seized with eminent domain and returned to the public to save lives. All future R&D should be publicly funded and medical companies will have to live with restructuring their business model to earn their margins from the (regulated) manufacture and sale of the products. And the public R&D money is there: given your $5B figure, the US war of terror^W^W^Wwar on terror's budget would have covered the cost of over 1,600 novel drugs, or about 80 per year, and, bonus, would have saved US lives instead of murdering far away brown people.

Future generations will view us with horror and disgust, and we deserve it. We live in a post-scarcity world where we chose to re-introduce artificial scarcity in order to enrichen the few at the expense of destroying the planet and ending lives. Humanity possesses enough food, homes, and medical resources to ensure that every human being will never die of unnecessary hunger, exposure, or injury or illness, and we *choose* to let them die of these things.

It's fucking horrible, and medical patents are one of the foremost evils of this warped system.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 9:41 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> The question is where the money comes from. Private companies put up a lot, but the public puts up much more

The absolute overwhelming majority of money for drug development funding comes from private sources. Around 80-90% of it (depending on the calculation method) - https://www.drugcostfacts.org/public-vs-private-drug-funding

The public and private academic funds are mostly used for fundamental research.

> Capitalism cannot work here.

So far capitalism is the only source that allowed us to get highly efficient vaccines within 6 months of disease discovery.

> All future R&D should be publicly funded and medical companies will have to live with restructuring their business model to earn their margins from the (regulated) manufacture and sale of the products.

This means that there won't be any more R&D. RIP.

Oh, and if you're expropriating everything, are you going to return investors money that they sank on failed pharma companies? I invested in an anti-sense DNA company a while ago and it totally failed (like the whole approach). I would like to get my money back, with interest.

> And the public R&D money is there: given your $5B figure, the US war of terror^W^W^Wwar on terror's budget would have covered the cost of over 1,600 novel drugs, or about 80 per year, and, bonus, would have saved US lives instead of murdering far away brown people.

Reality: high inefficient bureaucratic apparatus will be used to distribute money to cronies in the bureaucracy. Since 90% of drug candidates fail and it takes almost a DECADE to move a drug from initial screening hits to Phase 3, the funds can be embezzled with a perfect cover.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 29, 2021 7:27 UTC (Wed) by Randakar (guest, #27808) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem here is that your sources are flawed. That site - https://www.drugcostfacts.org is produced by a political lobbying group working for Big Pharma.

For background: https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/...

As for COVID, and who funded it: Here: https://bobsullivan.net/beyondthebumpersticker/whos-fundi...

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 29, 2021 8:42 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> The problem here is that your sources are flawed.

Care to point errors in them? SEC data is public.

Your own link contains tons of information about scum like T*ring Pharmaceuticals that doesn't relate to actual R&D at all.

The reality is that pharma development is EXPENSIVE. For a typical approved drug there are 10 drugs that failed in clinical trials. For each Moderna there are hundreds of startups that failed (just ask antisense DNA/RNA guys).

This is quite clear from the stock performance: ^DRG (Pharma Index on Nasdaq) went up from 320 in 2006 to 800 now. Meanwhile, NASDAQ overall went up from 2300 to 14500 now. BTW, this is one of the reasons pharma companies pay dividends.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 9:27 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> Because the public has NOT made an investment. Investment assumes risk, and the public simply bought fully developed vaccines. It was private investors who put their money at risk and funded the development.

I think that's not quite right - e.g. the EU gave a non-refundable €324M to Sanofi for 300M doses (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-eu-...), but it failed in trials and has delivered zero doses so far. The UK has ordered 540M doses across 8 vaccines for a population of 67M (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55274833), because of uncertainty about approval (only four have been approved so far, and some are restricted to certain age groups) and about supply levels. They weren't buying guaranteed supplies of fully developed vaccines, they were preordering before trials had completed and before production capacity had been built, and they were accepting high levels of risk at the time.

(I'm not disputing that private investors also put a lot of money into it, especially across the decades of R&D before the pandemic started and governments panicked. And they did that based on some expected ROI, and if governments change the rules now so the investors lose out on that return, I wouldn't feel sad for the investors but I'd be concerned about who's going to fund the next decades of R&D so we're prepared for the next pandemic. I think removing patent protection would need to come with a detailed plan to guarantee some extra billions of dollars of public funding per year, and then it'd start to be possible to debate whether it's a better alternative; it doesn't seem useful to complain about the patent protection in isolation.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 12:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> > It's not an R&D investment from the companies seeking to make a return

> It is. Pharma companies have the largest R&D percentage among ALL industries: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126#_idTextAnchor003 - see figure 1. They have even edged out semiconductor manufacturing.

Have you ever heard of "Creative Accounting"?

Last I heard, the amount of R&D on the books was usually roughly ten times the *real* R&D spend.

I would take those figures with a LARGE scoop of salt.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 13:07 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> I would take those figures with a LARGE scoop of salt.

Large Pharma companies routinely spend 2-3x on marketing/advertising as they do on R&D:

https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/rn-report-phar...

(Granted, that article is five years old, but links to the underlying research and citations are provided therein)

Whether or not you trust 3rd parties to be objective, This report, using data taken directly from Large Pharma's 2019 public financial disclosures, shows marketing budgets of 10-250%(!) of R&D:

https://www.pharmacychecker.com/askpc/pharma-marketing-re...

(And that uses the pharma companies' definition of "R&D" which has been somewhat scandal-plagued over the years)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 13:13 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> budgets of 10-250%(!) of R&D:

D'oh, that should be 110-250%

(in other words, they all claimed to spend more (sometimes considerably so) on marketing than they did on R&D)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 19:59 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Large Pharma companies routinely spend 2-3x on marketing/advertising as they do on R&D

Everybody is spending comparable amounts on marketing and sales, so this is not an argument at all. Your cereal manufacturer is likely spending more.

Want to lower that number down? Then you need to extend patent protection time. Right now a typical drug remains under patent protection for about 8 years after it's approved (patents are filed before the Phase 1 trials!). So companies have to aggressively promote drugs to have enough time to get profit.

Let's take an example from your list
> GlaxoSmithKline €21,891 €4,568 €11,402

GSK is spending 20% of its revenue on R&D. For comparison, Intel: $13.56B out of $77.9B (17%).

Profit margin for pharma companies is a more complicated story: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054843/

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 20:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> GSK is spending 20% of its revenue on R&D. For comparison, Intel: $13.56B out of $77.9B (17%).

...20% of revenue on R&D, and *over 50%* of revenue on marketing.

Meanwhile, Intel actually spent $19.7 billion, aka 25% of gross revenue, on R&D. They made about $20.9 billion in net profit, leaving $37.3 billion in non-R&D expenses. Of that, $24 billion was attributable to opearating costs (ie salaries and production costs of goods sold), leaving about $13.3B (18%) for everything else, notably including CapEx for future fab expansion.

(My source for this is Intel's 2020 financial report: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/14... )

> Profit margin for pharma companies is a more complicated story: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054843/

I'm not sure what your point here is, but okay, let's take the summary of findings of that article:

"In this cross-sectional study that compared the profits of 35 large pharmaceutical companies with those of 357 large, nonpharmaceutical companies from 2000 to 2018, the median net income (earnings) expressed as a fraction of revenue was significantly greater for pharmaceutical companies compared with nonpharmaceutical companies (13.8% vs 7.7%)."

...So large pharma companies have a median profit margin 80% higher than non-pharma companies. That doesn't exactly support the assertion that R&D expenses are bleeding big pharma dry.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2021 2:24 UTC (Sat) by mbg (subscriber, #4940) [Link]

> creative accounting

Indeed, working out how much it 'costs' for pharma to develop a new drug is not at all easy. Even working out the year-to-year R&D costs is difficult, due to complex corporate structures, R&D tax incentives, financing, etc. A lot of what is called 'R&D' on balance sheets you and I might call marketing (case in point: clinical trials that exist simply to introduce doctors to the drug, *after* it has been approved).

The bigger issue is the massive failure rate of drug development candidates. Costs of successful drugs need to be amortized against all the ones that didn't make it through the pipeline.

Needless to say, industry sources come up with much larger 'costs' than independent sources. A summary here: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/180/3/279.short

As to alternatives to massive big pharma profits, two people who have given it serious thought are Jamie Love from Knowledge Ecology International, who favours prize pools, and the economist Dean Baker.

In fact, Dean has written a lot recently on the costs of and profits from COVID-19 vaccine development: https://www.cepr.net/financing-drug-development-what-the-...

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:26 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> Because the public has NOT made an investment. Investment assumes risk, and the public simply bought fully developed vaccines.

Oh shut up.

I paid for my vaccine with the $150-200 of electricity I burned on Folding@Home for a year, as did several million other people. I'll toss you a lmgtfy link if you need help finding exact user numbers, and we can crowdfund you a pocket calculator if you need to know how much public investment in R&D that equates to.

What did you contribute?

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2021 23:50 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Folding at home have not contributed to the mRNA vaccines. It's a completely different area.

Me? My code was likely used in Illumina sequencers used to investigate the virus.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2021 11:02 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The COVID-19 vaccines received over $12B in public funds via Operation Warp Speed, significantly more than your $5B napkin figure.

BioNTech/Pfizer declined Operation Warp Speed funding. They did receive money from other public sources (e.g., in the case of BioNTech, the German government), but not to the same tune.

Having said that, the bulk of the research into mRNA vaccines was done long before Operation Warp Speed, or for that matter the COVID-19 pandemic, were even a thing. Most of the recent public money went into expediting clinical tests and regulatory approval and building out mass production capabilities, all of which are (a) quite expensive and (b) strongly in the public interest given the pandemic.

In any case, just to establish scale, $12B is approximately what it costs to build one Ford-class aircraft carrier. The US is planning to make ten of those. Just saying.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 15:15 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe you should learn that the USA is not the whole world - and that it didn't invent all vaccines either.

In the rest of the world, "Operation Warp Speed" didn't matter.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 15:24 UTC (Fri) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (1 responses)

The Pfizer vaccine was developed by the German company BioNTech, which received, among other investments, €100 of public EU funding and €375 in public funds from Germany, compared to just $320M in private funding. The public funds were offered without incentives for the public, whereas the private funds were in exchange for shares, marketing, and development rights for the lifesaving technology.

Forgive me for not enumerating the precise funding sources for all R&D associated with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Hi from Amsterdam.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:49 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The public funds were offered without incentives for the public, whereas the private funds were in exchange for shares, marketing, and development rights for the lifesaving technology.

The public now has access to a vaccine which is widely available at moderate cost and seems to be working quite well. Faced with a disease that has the potential to seriously disable or kill a sizeable proportion of the population (either directly, or indirectly by overwhelming the public health system to a point where other life-threatening conditions cannot be treated properly) as well as to cause enormous damage to the economy, quality of life of people, etc., that looks like a reasonable ROI as far as I'm concerned. (And I'm German so this is my tax money being spent. Would I have been prepared, in early 2020, to personally give €5 to BioNTech, no strings attached, so they could develop a COVID-19 vaccine? You bet.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:12 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> > Ah, of course the only checks and balances on medical research should be from medical researchers, and anyone without a degree and background experience in medical chemistry is not entitled to an opinion on the matter

> That is pretty much correct. You have no knowledge of the field, yet do not hesitate to make proclamations demanding its complete restructuring.

What you are missing, is that it is proven scientific fact that committees, made up of experts, do significantly WORSE at "getting things right", than committees containing a sizeable minority of lay people.

Okay, it's my personal opinion, but as the pandemic has gone on it seems clear that Chris Whitty - our national expert - has become significantly more doom-laden as the outlook has brightened - he's been taken in by his own propaganda ...

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2021 19:34 UTC (Wed) by Relk (guest, #136131) [Link] (1 responses)

Any readings or links on the research done about the effectiveness of committees of experts vs lay people? Seems really interesting!

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2021 20:42 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Don't know any links, but I think the research was done in the financial arena. And it's basic psychology. It's *important* to include outsiders and women.

The more your team is composed of male "experts", the more likely they are to re-inforce each others prejudices and biases, and end up going down a disastrous rabbit hole.

Women are far more likely to seek outside advice.

Outsiders are far more likely to question the experts' beliefs. (If you know me on LWN, look at how I'm quite happy to challenge well-known names. Sometimes I make a fool of myself, sometimes I'm bang on the money, and I hope the linux guys take another look at what they're doing. At the end of the day, I'm calling out what looks to me like bullshit. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but a second look is hopefully good value ...)

Both, if the women and outsiders have sufficient clout, result in far better decision making.

Very noticeable when dealing with company boards and non-exec directors. Outsider non-execs who take their role seriously are strongly associated with good performance of their companies. Weak and/or puppet non-execs and execs are strongly associated with rockets - the performance looks wonderful until they explode ...

But there is research, as far as I am aware, that says these insights are real elsewhere as well.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 23, 2021 16:58 UTC (Thu) by midol (guest, #25855) [Link]

I take it you have?