Vaccines: follow the money

An interesting article in today’s news feed on COVID-19 vaccine development. I’d known that the reason why many potential vaccines never get developed was my old favourite “follow the money”. It’s simply less profitable for pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines (which are intended to kill off viruses like measles) than to develop new drugs to treat chronic ie. recurring diseases like diabetes or Alzheimer’s. This article highlights why new vaccines typically take 10 years to come to market - again, it’s “follow the money”. It is simply too big an investment to make sure everything is available upfront (such as manufacturing facilities) for something that may likely fail before it gets released.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronav.../#6050ca2663fb

Same is true for antibiotics (which when first on the market will be used only for serious cases to delay development of resistance, and an antibiotic you take a few times, and then you are cured, whereas chronic diseases you need medicine the rest of your live), and diseases in third-world countries, most notably malaria. I once read somewhere that more money is spent to find a cure for baldness than for malaria.

I agree that profit is a big factor in what gets developed.
However, I'm glad that we have hundreds of private sector companies developing new drugs, as if the politicians ever decide governments should do this, they are likely to screw it up, just like everything else politicians touch.

What we probably need is a few smart people looking into how to promote development of low profitability but important drugs and vaccines. Perhaps the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, a few economists and so on.
With his huge fortune, Bill Gates is already doing that to an extent and I'm sure he'll have more success in allocating his own capital to good causes than yet another clueless government twit.