Security quote of the week

> 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.)