That was one of my first lessons about big pharma years ago. I collected data for a major drug, company, and their product did not perform as hypothesized. The study was not published.
The free capitalist market does not want scientific breakthroughs which cannot be monopolised, trademarked and controlled - it wants the profits for the next quarter to look better than the last.
One does not need to adopt the folly of marxism to understand why capitalist logic cannot be implied or applied as a universally intrinsically good (factual and normative) principle. More profit in shorter time for lesser cost at lower risk trumps all other considerations. If one uses that logic as a tool to understand, the decisionmaking process also becomes understandable:
Most of what helps alleviate Covid are well-known already in use methods and medicines. Low profit margin, no monopoly and full liability. Bad for business, but good for people.
(Anyone wanting to confuse or equate criticism of the failures of capitalism as support for marxism is welcome to do so, at their own peril. I suspect such a person has zero real-life experience of communism or socialism put into practice. I do, so I would never endorse those systems any more than I endorse a corporate capitalist one.)
That was one of my first lessons about big pharma years ago. I collected data for a major drug, company, and their product did not perform as hypothesized. The study was not published.
The free capitalist market does not want scientific breakthroughs which cannot be monopolised, trademarked and controlled - it wants the profits for the next quarter to look better than the last.
One does not need to adopt the folly of marxism to understand why capitalist logic cannot be implied or applied as a universally intrinsically good (factual and normative) principle. More profit in shorter time for lesser cost at lower risk trumps all other considerations. If one uses that logic as a tool to understand, the decisionmaking process also becomes understandable:
Most of what helps alleviate Covid are well-known already in use methods and medicines. Low profit margin, no monopoly and full liability. Bad for business, but good for people.
(Anyone wanting to confuse or equate criticism of the failures of capitalism as support for marxism is welcome to do so, at their own peril. I suspect such a person has zero real-life experience of communism or socialism put into practice. I do, so I would never endorse those systems any more than I endorse a corporate capitalist one.)