Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BurningFrog 1060 days ago
The point is that if pharmaceutical research is made unprofitable, that doesn't mean "other people" will do it.

It means no one will do that work.

1 comments

Roads are profitable? Non profits are profitable? There is an enormous amount of valuable work done in aggregate, every day, funded without the intent to profit and with work performed by people not maximizing for comp.

DARPA's mRNA research that directly led to rapid COVID vaccine development comes to mind. Cut out the middleman. Fund the research directly. We're paying for the end result one way or another (if not with direct government payment, with government payment to companies who are then taking profit, spending marketing/admin expenses, etc).

You make it sound as if nothing will get done if poor corporations can't lock medical tech up behind economic gates. We can always go back to ruthless capitalism if pharma price controls don’t work.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8426978/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

I'm not aware of anyone except for profit corporations getting drugs FDA approved.

Hoping that such actors would appear when needed seems optimistic.