The argument that the private sector should fund antiviral treatments also neglects a key issue: anti-infective agents like antibiotics or antivirals are not profitable enough for pharmaceutical companies to invest in the R&D, regardless of how useful they are. This is a well-known market failure. - ThreadSky

jwnickerson.bsky.social • 29 days ago

The argument that the private sector should fund antiviral treatments also neglects a key issue: anti-infective agents like antibiotics or antivirals are not profitable enough for pharmaceutical companies to invest in the R&D, regardless of how useful they are.
This is a well-known market failure.

Reposted from Raywat Deonandan

Deaths attributed to the common cold are so rare that they are not captured in most public mortality databases.

On the other hand, while deaths due to COVID have dropped precipitously since vaccination, COVID is still a cause of death in over 47K US death certificates in 2024.

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scinet.bsky.social•28 days ago

Vaccines have historically faced this issue as well (although that trend has been evolving somewhat)

evilceldrud.bsky.social•29 days ago

Blasphemy! Market failure? Impossible! Saying that is the sin against the Holy Ghost!

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

As much as people want to believe that private pharmaceutical companies will pick up this work that’s not being funded by governments, it’s simply not going to happen. The pharmaceutical industry is not particularly interested in infectious diseases. They are not profitable enough.

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

Why? Consider antibiotics. You take them for a few days, max, only sporadically when you get sick enough to need them. Because of a founded fear of antimicrobial resistance, they are prescribed sparingly.
All of these things are clinically appropriate and shrink the market size.

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

Compare this to a drug for a chronic disease where someone might start on it mid-life and remain on it for years or decades (think antihypertensives or diabetes meds).

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

This is the fundamental problem with outsourcing medicines R&D to the private sector and treating medicines as commercial products: not every illness is profitable enough to generate investment, so we are left without medicines for which there is a high health burden if it’s not profitable enough.

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

This is, of course, to say nothing of the public funding for the basic science that underpins literally every blockbuster drug. Public funding de-risks those early stage discoveries that allows new technologies to be developed. Put another way: pharma companies are free riding off public science.

jwnickerson.bsky.social•29 days ago

My personal view is that there are simply some areas of medicine that won’t see the R&D of new treatments we need without public funds (or private philanthropy, which is much more limited). I just don’t see where the funding will come from for vaccines and medicines for some of these diseases.

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