Well, typically pharmaceutical companies are international, and, while we let corporations do whatever they want in the U.S., that doesn’t apply everywhere. That’s why prescription medication is often cheaper in other countries.
I’m not sure what your second paragraph is about, because your first paragraph seems to say you didn’t intend to imply a conspiracy theory about the government creating diseases to kill the poor, but your second paragraph is largely defending that idea. So, I’ll just point out that most unethical researchers still do unethical research in the same of saving people. That doesn’t make it ethical, but it’s an ends justifying the means situation. Your Tuskegee researchers, for example, did horrible things, but it was to better understand a disease, not to kill people (that was just a side effect). So if the poor are infected deliberately, it’ll be under controlled, horrifying circumstances, not just a general horrifying release of the illness. Regarding government conspiracies, I didn’t say that governments were bad at secrets in general, I said this government is bad at secrets. If they were good at secrets, we probably wouldn’t all know they bought an election from Russia. And, of course, if this was the start of a secret government program to kill the poor people, they probably would have just authorized illegal research under the table, and not publically lifted a research ban. (Though, admittedly, they’re really bad at secrets)
All that aside, however, I didn’t say that this was a good idea. I said that it’s wrong to say that “better vaccines” is a minimal reward. Better vaccines and vaccine administration killed smallpox, and smallpox killed about 2 million people per year, if 1967 was a representative year. That is a massive amount of lives saved. The benefits from good vaccine research are incalculable. The risks are on a similar scale, and as I said originally, I am not qualified the judge the likelihood of those risks. All I’m saying is, if you think “better vaccines” Is a trivial result, you probably don’t appreciate vaccines enough.
On a side note, you mention that some drugs cost stupid amounts of money. This is true. Vaccines, however, tend to be extremely cheap, by drug standards, and I have no idea why. I believe they’re cheap to produce, but that doesn’t mean jack-shit in terms of drug pricing. I know vaccines save health insurance companies a lot of money, and insurance lobbies are pretty powerful, but reasonable prices of all drugs would, presumably, save health insurance providers money, and god knows that isn’t the case. Anyone know what’s up with this?
