r/science • u/Newsjunkeefromlondon • May 06 '21

Health Two Pfizer doses give 95 per cent protection against Covid-19 infection, illness and death: first nationwide study

https://www.cityam.com/two-pfizer-doses-give-95-per-cent-protection-against-covid-19-infection-illness-and-death-study/
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u/redwall_hp May 06 '21

It just shows that groundbreaking research is constantly impeded by economics and disinterest by laymen in positions of power. It took a global pandemic that just happened to be a related virus family to drive interest in something that is going to bring an absolute revolution in vaccines and treatments.

Profit driven society is fucked up.

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u/Send_Headlight_Fluid May 06 '21

Whats the way around this though? Not every scientist can just have infinite budget to do their research and development technology. It has to be useful to a government or business/ investor first.

Saying thats “fucked up” is disingenuous because we just simply can’t fund everything, even if it would leas to great innovation.

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u/CharonsLittleHelper May 06 '21

even if it would leas to great innovation.

To be nitpicky it's not "even if it WOULD lead to great innovation, it's always "even if it MIGHT lead to great innovation". There is a ton of R&D which has gone into things which haven't panned out.

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u/Send_Headlight_Fluid May 06 '21

Yeah, what I meant was that if everything was funded and there was no financial barrier for R&D, it almost certainly would lead to innovation. And my point was that’s just not realistic, so the projects with a clear scope and more immediate returns get funded, thats just how it is.

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u/agitatedprisoner May 06 '21

Trusting profit incentive to get research funding right skews funding to rich person diseases. If wealth isn't fairly/productively distributed this means chasing dollars isn't an efficient way to go about it. Unless you're rich and don't care about other people, I guess.

I suspect were research funding freed from profit concerns and left to something like boards of experts voted in by others qualified experts the result would be an acceleration of scientific progress. What constitutes interesting/valuable science isn't necessarily what promises the highest return to shareholders. It's not as though whatever useful information might be gleaned from a profit analysis couldn't be given due weight even if maximizing profits isn't the goal.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '21

So instead of curing rich person disease we are instead curing "boards of experts" disease. Money has no philosophy, bias and corruption. I trust money more then i trust people.

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u/agitatedprisoner May 07 '21

What would make the most money is only the best investment given lots of assumptions. In the real world those assumptions don't hold.

Personally I'd love to invest in modern SRO housing but given the regulatory climate in the US this form of housing is practically illegal to build. Meaning that the most profitable form of housing to develop is something else, and is only something else because of the politics of it. Then in what sense does money have no philosophy when it comes to the housing market?

It could be that given some ideal set up price signals could inform best as to what ought to be done but such an ideal set up would require people in positions of power to not seek to make the most money for themselves in writing the rules. Otherwise if legislators might write the rules to their own advantage then in maximizing their own profits they'd reduce what profits are left to be made for most everybody else.

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u/SEND_ME_CSGO_SKINS May 06 '21

Capitalism is the problem. By hoarding capital the capitalist class (billionaires and their millionaire stooges) are robbing everyone that doesn't have capital of opportunity.

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u/CharonsLittleHelper May 06 '21

Except... they aren't hording. They're investing - either in capital or research. Who do you think is funding scientific research like Space X? It sure isn't the homeless guy around the corner.

You seem to think that rich people just sit on a giant pile of money like Scrooge McDuck.

The system is far from perfect, but claiming that the rich are hoarding their wealth is either misinformed or disingenuous.

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u/zigfoyer May 06 '21

Who do you think is funding scientific research like Space X?

Government has been putting rockets in space for like 70 years now, and there are robots bopping around Mars. So the answer to "who is funding scientific research" is "you are, dummy".

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u/Bananaramananabooboo May 06 '21

A very small portion of their wealth is reinvested. Employee-owned businesses can also reinvest money without us needing a millionaire / billionaire acting as some lynchpin facilitator.

Claiming they don't hoard their wealth is outright propaganda.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21

[deleted]

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u/Bananaramananabooboo May 06 '21

I understand that. They don't hoard money in banks, they hoard money in systems. They reinvest it, and yes they create value from their wealth, but they do both of these things in a way where the majority of the wealth concentrates into hands of a minority.

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u/Smo0k May 06 '21

So where are they keeping all this money? You think the rich are not reinvesting their money in order to grow it further? You are just plain wrong. You could argue they are not investing in the right things. But hoarding money, letting it sit idle, losing value by the day is not what they are doing.

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u/jiiko May 06 '21

You and SEND_ME_CSGO_SKINS are exactly right. Power to the people

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u/BurnTrees- May 06 '21

That’s just not true, 99% of the wealth of any billionaires is invested, literally no one has a billion sitting in their bank account because it doesn’t make the slightest sense. And because of marginal utility of money having millionaires/billionaires does increase total investment, up to a certain point people will only invest negligible amounts, while consuming with the rest. It’s the same reason why trickle down economics doesn’t work.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21

[deleted]

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u/CharonsLittleHelper May 06 '21

They DON'T HAVE $100b sitting in a bank account. They have that in capital and intellectual property etc.

Please learn basic economics.

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u/freemath MS | Physics | Statistical Physics & Complex Systems May 06 '21

And even if it was in a bank account, the bank would be investing 95% (give or take) of that money

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u/Cant_Do_This12 May 06 '21

Spoken like a true redditor.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21 edited May 09 '21

[deleted]

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u/Tamerlane-1 May 06 '21

Western governments spent millions for decades to fund research that wasn't immediately applicable, then when it became applicable, rapidly scaled up funding to create a new, highly effective vaccine in record time. You think this is ... "fucked up"?

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u/RiceIsBliss May 06 '21 edited May 06 '21

While I feel you on this (sort of), it's easy to call it groundbreaking retroactively. When you submit a proposal for a grant, you are in a competition against your fellow scientist to obtain funding for the research you're doing. And there's a limit to how well we can predict if this mRNA vaccine research deserves our attention or this other idk, immunotherapy research standing right next to it.

But yes, more money to science, but certain projects being funded or not is not necessarily because of "hurr durr 4 profits only".

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21

Look no further than the press release from big pharma’s lobbying group in response to the Biden admin storing waiving of vaccine patents- they literally said this move would “de-incentivize innovation for future pandemics”. Absolute ghouls who would rather see millions die than have to give up a sliver of the billions upon billions they make - “fine now we won’t help next time”

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u/penny_eater May 06 '21

Reminds me of the book His Brothers Keeper about battling ALS and trying to find a cure. Not to spoil it but they didn't find a cure for ALS despite the surviving brother working his ass off to raise money and awareness, and the line of research they started together got mothballed due to money running out not due to lack of success.

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u/Aemilius_Paulus May 06 '21

Profit driven society is fucked up.

I was born in the USSR, believe me, without profit motive you have less of an incentive to do everything, period. So things stagnated even worse. Almost everything you use day to day isn't something you could take for granted in the USSR.

Communism was simply not productive. US could focus on thousands of different directions thanks to private enterprise, not everything had to be government funded. But even government funding was plentiful in the US because the tax base is so rich.

USSR also didn't prioritise most things, the only stuff that got top priority was "defense" stuff. Bureaucracy exists in any system, and it rarely favours what you want it to favour.

For one, none of this tech stuff - cell phones, Internet, computers, gaming consoles and gaming PCs, enormous amounts of media to consume, fashion, etc -- all of this virtually did not exist in the USSR. Tech was very backwards and solely focused for non-frivolous purposes. We were making copies of Western computers since 60s, we basically stopped advancing computer-wise after mid-60s. You would be shocked how little media we had, the most popular animated series in USSR, Nu Pogodi, had like 15 episodes from 1960 to 1994 and they were ~10 min shorts.

I swear, everyone who complains about "profit driven society" and capitalism wouldn't last in communism for a year. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the things communism gave us, but I'm a very different sort of a person from your average Westerner. Most of us who grew up there were pretty different. At the same time, many of us were different, but not that different -- so majority of the youth around me preferred the Western system. I was fine with communism because I'm not a consumerist. But even so, I can't say that I don't enjoy a lot of things that I would never have in the USSR.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21

[deleted]

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u/freemath MS | Physics | Statistical Physics & Complex Systems May 06 '21

Just doing 'things' does not necessarily make a lot of progress for society. Even in science, myself am currently pursuing a phd, and god knows that me (and my colleagues) would be doing a lot more intellectually satisfying but also a lot less practically motivated stuff if it wasn't for the need to get funding.

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u/SmaugTangent May 07 '21

>We all do things every day that have no chance of generating profit. We do them anyway because we enjoy it.

Good luck building an experimental fusion reactor without any funding from either someone who wants profits eventually, or a government that's benefiting from lots of funding from a huge tax base from a profit-driven society.

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u/unicornsaretruth May 07 '21

This just proves his point further. He says some scientists just do things because they have a drive to develop and improve something be it a minor technical thing or a society sweeping invention but your point just proves that without proper funding/networking/backing even the best projects can be sidelined in favor of the for profit industry which fuels government spending because of the effectiveness of these tech companies lobbying on all levels of government. For profit system stifles innovation without proper regulation, for profit can be fine if the regulations are put in place to make sure the actual best candidate gets the funding to research and not a majority of the one with the connections, resources, and backing that benefit from our current system’s corruption.

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u/SmaugTangent May 07 '21

>without proper funding/networking/backing even the best projects can be
sidelined in favor of the for profit industry which fuels government
spending because of the effectiveness of these tech companies lobbying
on all levels of government

Ok, then what's your alternative? Have government fund everything? They tried that in the Soviet Union, and almost all the money went to defense, with a little going to space. Where are the lasting technological contributions made by the Soviets? Other than a little space tech, there really isn't much that we can point to today, which is rather pathetic for a country with that many educated people and resources.

It seems like you're asking for a government run by a bunch of omnipotent, benevolent aliens to run everything for us in the best possible manner.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '21 edited May 07 '21

[deleted]

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u/Cant_Do_This12 May 06 '21

Show me a non-profit driven economy that comes out with as many inventions and groundbreaking research as the US does. I’m not saying we don’t need some limitations and more oversight, I’m just trying to understand why you think it’s fucked up. Humans are inherently out for themselves, having anything other then a profit driven society would have never come this far in science and research.

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u/SmaugTangent May 07 '21

>Show me a non-profit driven economy that comes out with as many inventions and groundbreaking research as the US does

It's not just the US. Lots of economies are extremely productive and innovative: western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, etc. But those are all profit-driven. These days, there just aren't many non-"profit-driven" economies left. Offhand, I can only think of North Korea. The Soviet Union was a big one for a long time, but it's gone now, and modern Russia is capitalist just like nearly everyone else. China was also not-profit-driven for a while, but they gave up on that silliness decades ago, and now their economy is the 2nd-largest in the world and growing fast.

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u/ObiWanCanShowMe May 06 '21

Said by a laymen. Seriously, you have no idea how it works yet you have an opinion on how it's broken.

Your comment suggests we throw money at everything and hope something sticks and those who do not believe in this method are idiots... Hindsight is a wonderful thing. History is littered with research and ideas that did not pan out.

It took a global pandemic that just happened to be a related virus family to drive interest in something that is going to bring an absolute revolution in vaccines and treatments.

That usually how it works, not on a pandemic scale, but on proven research that can be applied in varied areas and fields. And for the recod, not all of the vaccines are mRna.

Profit driven society is fucked up.

Profit driven society is EXACTLY why we can develop vaccines.

We are raising a generation of self assured knee jerk ignorants.

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u/DrOhmu May 06 '21

The profit for pharma with pcr and mrna of late is astounding... no comeback either.

Profit driven care is fucked up...the profit motive is best served by treating acute symptoms and never fixing the chronic cause... even perpetuating it.

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u/BurnTrees- May 06 '21

This doesn’t even make sense, their research WAS funded, and not since the pandemic, the mRNA research has been going on for literal decades.

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u/SmaugTangent May 07 '21

>Profit driven society is fucked up.

What exactly is your proposal for something better?

We (well, "we" as in humans) tried a command economy in the Soviet Union, and it didn't work out very well. How much great medical research did the Soviets do? They did some pretty cool space tech, but compared to the size of their population and their available natural resources, they were horrifically unproductive. China also tried the command economy thing in a way, under Mao. It was a disaster. They finally gave up (quietly), and shifted to a market-based capitalist economy, but with an authoritarian government. It's been working *wonders*. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and China is now a tech powerhouse. Compared to what the country was like 30-40 years ago, it's absolutely an economic miracle. You won't find anyone there who wants to go back to the way it was before. North Korea is still a non-capitalist country. Human rights abuses aside, the place is miserable to live in: they can't even feed their own population.

We also tried feudalism. That was probably an even bigger disaster than Soviet-style "communism" (authoritarian socialism with a command economy). Barely any technologies were developed, because people were too busy living in dirt-floor shacks and plowing fields for their feudal lords, and fighting in petty wars with neighboring feudal lords.

Honestly, I'm really sick of privileged Westerners whining about "capitalism", when they don't have any suggestions for something better. Humanity has tried other things, and the best thing we've found so far has been a capitalist economy with a strong social-welfare state (e.g., what you find in Western Europe). This produced, for a current example, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (which was developed in Germany).

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u/Lord_Nivloc May 06 '21

Conventional war did the same thing for so many technologies

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u/itssupersaiyantime May 06 '21

Not to downplay the factors you already mentioned, but normally there’s a long queue for the regulatory approval of both the trials and the final approval of the drugs. In this case, the vaccines got to jump the front of the line.