[seabird]

The superhero analogy is akin to saying "football is a game where you run a ball to the end of a field". It completely trivializes the realities of developing highly experimental technologies. Moderna doesn't get to fly in like an invincible superhero and defeat the villain with no real concern for whether or not they're going to be able to do it again.

[burkaman]

But they already have the vaccine! There's no immediate risk, and the long term risk is not that serious. I guess the core thing I don't understand is why anyone would assume that releasing their process is equivalent to going bankrupt. Is this process all they have? Would releasing it eliminate all barriers of entry? Would the US government no longer be willing to give them grants if they become too philanthropic and save too many lives? Why couldn't they continue to be a wildly successful company?

[seabird]

It is a serious risk. Their manufacturing process and their tribal knowledge of it is all they have, save maybe political clout. Through this they prop up everything else. On top of all of this, they might not be able to convey the process to the extent needed for others to recreate it, even if they wanted to.

I work at a company that faces this as an existential threat; you might be able to knock off our products in single quantities, but because of decades of process knowledge that no single person (or even a committee of people) could tell you, you won't be able to beat us on price. Once you do that, it's over for us, and any beneficial technology that we planned on developing is going to need to be provided by our competitors, who don't actually have a culture of making improvements, only leeching them.

There are countless industries with high but tenable barriers to entry, and completely dealbreaking process knowledge that actually determines the viability of a company in that industry.

[burkaman]

Alright, you've convinced me that it would be a real sacrifice, but it's still so obviously worth it. There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice to do what Moderna could do right now. The worst case scenario seems to be that Moderna employees with "helped develop the most effective Covid vaccine on the planet" on their resumes have to get new jobs, and new treatments based on their technology are developed more quickly now that the whole world can experiment with it.

If they can't communicate their process quickly enough because of the tribal knowledge, then no harm done, and at least they tried.

[mhb]

> There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice

Ha. Maybe there's little you wouldn't sacrifice that isn't yours, but there's very little you would sacrifice yourself to save someone. For $500 right now you can save someone's life for a year. What seems to be confusing you is that you're not thinking of Moderna as real people.

[burkaman]

I donate lots of my own money directly to people who need it. No, not all of it, because as I've said I'm a normal self-interested person like the people who run Moderna. That's why I'm not asking them to sacrifice everything they have, or anything close to that. They would continue to lead incredibly privileged and comfortable lives, just like I do.

I guess you already don't believe me, but I do make sacrifices in my own life, and if I were in the position of running Moderna, I still cannot imagine being unwilling to make another one. Doesn't seem like I can convince anyone here, but that's the source of my confusion - why does anyone need to be convinced? How is this not normal? When I say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives", why is everyone like "sure buddy, you like money as much as the rest of us, we know you're lying".

[seabird]

Would you sacrifice hundreds of jobs (maybe even thousands if you account for second-order effects) for a chance (not a guarantee) that some other company will be able to use the technology in time to deal with the Coronavirus? Could you accept that there's a chance that new companies moving into this space will be much less cooperative if Moderna loses the fight after giving away their process?

There's a forest from the trees. Nobody here is saying that you're lying when you say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives". The majority of us would probably do the same, but those aren't the stakes, and nothing is that simple. That's not what forcing Moderna to share their process is. This is a threat to an entity that has been fairly cooperative, and it is that way because of the chance group of people and attitudes that make that entity up. There is no guarantee that whatever comes next will want to play nice.