Security quote of the week

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.

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.)

> 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

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?

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

Hi from Amsterdam.

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