A profit opportunity requiring significant investment has led to fast and fantastic results that will benefit us all. But you want to punish the opportunists who've absorbed significant risk to bring us those results because you've decided their motivation isn't sufficiently pure.
I pray anyone of like mind is never in a position to enact such progress-killing madness and fear terribly that government is already full of them.
And besides, it is mind-numbingly complicated to calculate "at-cost" because as others have pointed out, that includes all of the dead-end R&D, ongoing legal exposure, interest on the loans used to cashflow operations at pharmaceutical giants, appropriate licensing of existing intellectual property that these vaccines are built on, and the million other ways money is spent to develop pharmaceuticals.
I pray anyone of like mind is never in a position to enact such progress-killing madness and fear terribly that government is already full of them.
And besides, it is mind-numbingly complicated to calculate "at-cost" because as others have pointed out, that includes all of the dead-end R&D, ongoing legal exposure, interest on the loans used to cashflow operations at pharmaceutical giants, appropriate licensing of existing intellectual property that these vaccines are built on, and the million other ways money is spent to develop pharmaceuticals.