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Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

reuters.com

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Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#281

Post by [deleted] »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #143
apexalpha wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.

I care. Just like about the bailouts. Socializing the funding/losses and privatizing the profits is just pure corruption.

[deleted]

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#282

Post by [deleted] »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #143
apexalpha wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.

I care. Just like about the bailouts. Socializing the funding/losses and privatizing the profits is just pure corruption.

[deleted]

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#283

Post by dicomdan »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #143
apexalpha wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.

I care. Just like about the bailouts. Socializing the funding/losses and privatizing the profits is just pure corruption.

Would you rather hold on to your anti-corporate principles or have a safe and effective vaccine to protect the most vulnerable in the world? These public-private partnerships aren't ideal, but there hasn't been any other way in history to develop safe vaccines on such short timeline.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#284

Post by mikepurvis »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #235
mikepurvis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing in Waterloo Region was really good over the summer— minimal wait times, multiple drive-in sites, results turned around in 24-36hrs. I think they just failed to account for the bump that would come from school starting and people wanting to get tested in advance of Thanksgiving. I think the "military involved" piece is key, especially if you're talking about the US. It's maybe a bit trite at this point, but a…

I guess that's the thing; the gov't is the one who made the decision to bring kids back fulltime, how incompetent do you have to be to not know there'd be a bump in testing demands? Re: Waterloo region, I work at Google Waterloo, so although I don't live in KW (I'm in rural Flamborough) most of my coworkers do. I had one who showed up at 7am to get a test, lineups were around several blocks and they shut the whole th…

Oh yeah, definitely. Can't help thinking of how much better things would likely be if we'd had a Horwath administration through this crisis. :(

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#286

Post by vxNsr »

komali2 wrote: post #220
leemcalilly wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not corrupt. It’s money well spent. The benefits to us all are most likely more valuable than anything we’ve spent on vaccine research. Government balance sheets also probably come out ahead on that investment given that the alternative is an economy with a raging pandemic and resulting lower tax base. Then there is the logistical effort of manufacturing the vaccine at the scale and speed required. There are…

> What is the alternative? We create a government agency that specializes in manufacturing and distributing pharma products? Yes. Why don't you think that would work?

Because the government hasn't been able to do anything right for 270 years, why do you think they're suddenly gonna wake up a figure out mass manufacturing?

We can't educate our kids at an acceptable level without billions of dollars being donated on top of all the tax collected, we can't figure out how to make medicare work responsibly despite literally being able to control costs, what do you think makes drug manufacturing any different?

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#287

Post by reegnz »

Unklejoe wrote: post #232
wffurr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone is going to pay. It may not be you at the point of the needle, but somebody will. Governments will pay a lot to get their economies going again. That burden will in turn fall on taxpayers one way or another; whether it's directly via taxes or budget cuts or indirectly via inflation or debt service.

Yes, I realize that. My comment was in response to the criticism of these companies being funded by tax dollars while being granted a patent. The implication being that we're paying (as taxpayers) but getting nothing in return since we would have to pay for the vaccine anyway. My response is that we're getting the vaccine for free in return. That said, I'm not sure that it's actually going to be free. That's just wha…

What you get in return is somebody (the government) took the risk of a blind faith payment to have a university develop a vaccine.

That's what you paid for, not for production, not for distribution, not for anything else.

You didn't pay taxes for a free vaccine, because you don't pay remotely enough taxes for that to be viable at all. Unless every country on earth takes their fair share of blind-faith financing a single company.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#288

Post by logicchains »

acdha wrote: post #154
Izkata wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile the general populace cares less and less, so we may be back to normal in the spring regardless.

A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist. People getting their news from irresponsible politicians get sick like everyone else, and that’s why it won’t get back to normal before there’s a vaccine or very effective treatment: it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable.

>A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist.

This is demonstrably false. Some places are already back to life as normal, like Florida and Sweden, with no business closures. And in spite of this they still have lower deaths per capita than some places with heavy lockdowns like New York, Peru, Belgium and Spain.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#289

Post by RobertDeNiro »

samwillis wrote: post #205
zoobab wrote: post #116

Good news for US BigPharma Merck holding the Oxford patents, while public funding has paid for its research: https://archive.is/aGUJd

Could you please indicate where you heard that Merck has any ownership of the patents to the Oxford vaccine? The cited article indicates that it’s is AstraZeneca who have done a deal with Oxford and that the deal with Merch, while an early option, fell though. Is would seem “US BigParma” are not involved, as AstraZeneca is a British/Swedish company.

Merck's stock is down while Astrazenca's is up, thats enough indication that merck doesnt hold anything.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#290

Post by alxlaz »

apexalpha wrote: post #134
zoobab wrote: post #116

Good news for US BigPharma Merck holding the Oxford patents, while public funding has paid for its research: https://archive.is/aGUJd

Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.

> not some non-profit startup.

There's no(t necessarily a) question of any non-profit startup there. The problem is that the people who paid for the development of the product should also hold rights over the product. If the vaccine was developed with public money, it should be publicly available -- not necessarily (but yes, also to) non-profit startups, but also to any other manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry, since they (allegedly, in any case...) pay taxes, too, and have therefore invested in this product.

If Merck wants to use their proven manufacturing base with an excellent delivery track record (which nobody is denying, after all), that's great. They can:

1. Put their money into the development of said vaccine, or

2. Acquire the license to manufacture it, at a reasonable price, like they do with any technology that wasn't developed using public money, or

3. If we don't want stuff that's already been paid for with public money to be sold to manufacturers, which I don't disagree with at all, then, sure, they should get it for free -- but in that case they shouldn't be the sole owner of the rights towards that product, either.

(Edit: FWIW, I'm all for 3. I've worked in the medical industry and I know full well that there's a great deal of work that goes between first-stage research and final production, and that it's incredibly hard and expensive to take the result of a publicly-funded research program and turn it into a product. That doesn't change the fact that said research programs are publicly-funded -- their results should be available to anyone who paid for them. If someone wants exclusive rights to the result of some research program, then they're welcome to pay for it themselves.)

As it stands now, they own the rights (including licensing rights!) to a bunch of products that they haven't paid for at all.

All the suits blabber on and on and on about how the government should keep its nose out of their business. How about they tell the government where to stick it when it's about paying for their research, too?

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