to follow your logic: if one company does cure the disease then they're the ones who make the money while the others fail and then there actually is monetary incentive for curing disease.

Our healthcare system is stressed to the max with too few doctors, nurses, etc. not sure who makes the money off more disease, I don’t see hospitals popping up everywhere. Insurance companies certainly don’t make more money. All our radiology machines are running 6 days a week.

The true beneficiaries won't be pharma corporations but faith healers and snake oil peddlers Sometimes political decisions are purely based on stupidity and malice.

The problem with that statements is that NIH has not presently announced a funding reduction for respiratory virus vaccine development. They have announced a shift to non-mRNA technologies and discontinuation of funding for some mRNA projects.

Yeah the fight against mRNA vaccines is purely ideological. If a layperson understood how cool the science is behind it they wouldn’t be scared of them. In fact I’m sure they’d take a vaccine for cancer in a heartbeat when faced with the alternatives

Also, this administration’s ideas to fight respiratory diseases with vaccines is using older slower technologies. Like choosing to wash clothes by hand instead of the washing machine.

The science is cool, sure, but that doesn’t mean the outcome is good. Older vaccine technologies are proven, have good safety records, and have shown excellent effectiveness, including near elimination of several diseases. They’re not obsolete by any means.

mRNA is proven, you can basically program the vaccine and produce it quickly like writing computer code. It’s harnessing a shortcut to the same way our immune cells present to our antibody producing cells. For diseases that mutate rapidly it’s essential to be able to produce a vaccine quickly.

Other technologies are proven and appropriate mostly for our bacterial diseases and have worked because of herd immunity and them being mandatory for school.

That’s not true. There are numerous highly effective vaccines for viral diseases. This includes measles, polio, hpv, and smallpox. I don’t think the speed advantage is that significant. Annual flu vaccines have been produced with non-mRNA technologies for some time.

Ok yes there are viral vaccines that have been given for decades, thus the herd immunity and the low incidence of those diseases. Our older vaccines aren’t 100% effective but because of low exposure because of the low levels of circulating disease they give the impression that people are 100% immune

Experts do feel that the speed advantage is significant. Like being able to respond to a potential new virus (bird flu). They are speaking out about it currently. I don’t know the logistics of mRNA could be developed for flu, but as it is we develop our flu based on what happened in other parts

Of the world 9-6 months ago, if we could cut that time lapse down to the strains that happened at the end of the flu season that could be significant. Anecdotally people talk about I got the flu shot but I still got the flu, there might be ways to mitigate that