[graeme]

This is completely incoherent. Consider a book author who has a monopoly on for profit publishing, but anyone else can publish for no profit.

The book author’s expected profits would plummet as it would be the wild west in production.

What you’re really saying is “we should pay massively less for vaccine development”. Which again, sounds nice, but....why would anyone have developed a vaccine? It’s a complex project which costs billions and has taken 12+ months while taking resources away from competing projects.

The public money is an incentive to get people to put those considerations aside and devote all their resources to vaccine development. This is a sensible public investment in a return to normalcy.