Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on Covid vaccine “consistent with the value”

Depends on the state, sort of like the quality of private companies vary and if you’ve ever lived in a part of you’re own country where the grocery stores are crap and later you move and their very competitive and a comparative delight. However, one has to experience the difference themselves to understand this fact I believe. There are a huge multitude of factors at play.

Many of us (me included for most of my life, hell maybe I’m doing it now), tend to over extrapolate how much our own experience is the experience everywhere and that what we see must be fitting some logical rule or trend. Reality is annoyingly more complex than we like.

> 'owned by public sector' does not mean 'public good' What does mean public good then?

I believe you're misreading GP's comment and playing on words. "owned by public sector" doesn't have to mean "being run by people elected through general elections". You seem to refer to federal government so probably you're referring to US government and how your opinion is that it is inherently bad. That's another debate i don't have anything to say on (not US myself) and i believe you have a bigger problem if you don't trust your government. Now tons of "public sector" enterprises can well enough be run in relatively closed loop. The solution is quite easy: have dedicated taxes for dedicated such enterprises, instead of all the taxes going into a general budget at the hand of general politics. This is how public healthcare, pension or stuff like water used to work in eg france, before it started to get teared into pieces. They are self-funded basically by people paying for the service, but since we have realized basically everyone needs it, paying is mandatory, and the amount you pay is proportional to your salary: the so-called salary-contributions and company-contributions.

Reminder that these vaccines were large majority tax-payer funded, and both Moderna and Pfizer have legal immunity to any ill effects caused by the vaccine [1]

They are legally immune to being sued due to damages caused by the vaccine. In developing the vaccine, they also somehow got vaccinated against our legal system.

This should have come with strict pricing rules and other strings in order to receive its benefits. Instead, if you are working on problems relating to certain contagions, you too can be liability immune — but just until 2024 after Moderna and Pfizer have both made absurd amounts of money and paid back the politicians who made it happen. It is laughable policy only a very short sighted population and leadership would think is smart.

That price will keep hiking and now we have super-powered organizations highly incentivized for plagues only they can cure. I’m sure they will leave billions / trillions on the table and be benevolent about this.

[1] https://aspr.hhs.gov/legal/PREPact/Pages/default.aspx

>Can we say the same thing about social media companies ?

Good god no. One of the benefits of the Twitter-Musk saga is that it proved that the feds really were meddling quite a bit with social media companies requesting censorship. You want to give them the keys entirely?

I bet that we have reached close to maximum saturation of folks getting boosted. Less and less people will be getting these shots, but since they have a taste for the money that was pouring in, they can jack up the price to make up for lack of sales.