[gjulianm]

It's fairly disingenuous to put those problems as examples.

> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly,

I can find HEPA air filters in Amazon for less than $100.

> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,

The N95 masks I use are fairly comfortable. However, a N95 mask must be well fitted to provide protection, which means it has to be tight, which means it won't be highly comfortable. This is a physical limitation of the problem, no amount of innovation can avoid the fact that you need a tight seal.

> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection

The mRNA vaccines are a great example of a pretty cool innovation. It doesn't completely prevent infection, yeah, but no vaccine does that. Having a vaccine in a year and a half, widely available, when the initial estimates were of two years if we were lucky...

[9wzYQbTYsAIc]

> I can find HEPA air filters in Amazon for less than $100.

Can you retrofit a house’s HVAC for positive pressure ventilation for $500?

[winternett]

HEPA fiters are revolutionary, but they don't quite qualify as new innovation do they?

N95 masks have been around for ages as well. I have ideas of course on how they could be improved, as I am sure many others do, but it gets drowned out daily by all the nonsense of debating whether masks are even effective... We can't deny that politicizing mask effectiveness is in the same distraction bag as flat earth debates, but somehow we all just shrug it off not realizing that it is what clouds real discussion about meaningful innovation.

No one is disparaging the innovation behind mRNA vaccines, that is not a related or accurate talking point, it's a side-track.