Basically I’m saying they should make a finished solution but leave distribution and full scale manufacturing to private industry. Not because private will do that part better, but because at that point there’s not much need to use taxes to finish the job. What drug manufacturer wouldn’t want the contract to exclusively sell an already developed product? All they need to do is follow FDA regulations and pricing.
Either development is the tricky part, in which case it would be irrelevant if the formula is public, since another company won't be able to compete just by knowing the formula, they also have to fund development of their own; or the basic research is the problem, in which case development is a minor expense and should be covered by the sales.
Either way, making the results of research that has already been funded by charities, the state etc public should be mandatory, and would still leave these companies with plenty of profits.
Development is everything that goes into putting an application together for the FDA, as well as getting facilities together for their inspectors. It is indeed irrelevant if the “formula” is public. Every company needs to put together an application of some kind to make marketing claims. There are many kinds of applications.
> would still leave these companies with plenty of profits.
Development is undertaken with risk capital. “Plenty of profits” is not the bar; the returns must exceed those found elsewhere for the same level of risk. Otherwise new drugs are simply not developed.
The thread was about "why would Pfizer pay for R&D if the vaccine/antibody could then simply be relincesed".
And the answer is: because they can sell the vaccine for more money than it costs to research a new one.
If they have to pay extra to develop, then they still have a huge moat. Even if Moderna or J&J is also licensed to produce the same vaccine, Moderna will also have to pay the same cost before they can have a product, so no change in incentives compared to today.
This whole "but then who pays for development" is a red herring you've thrown in.
And in general, the bottom line is this: if a piece of research, be it basic research or clinical trials or anything else is mainly funded from public money, then it should belong to the public, not to the corporation that was payed to execute the study. The corporation has already gotten paid for the R&D in this scenario, so it's fair for the public to license that R&D to other corps as well, and allow all corps to compete on price of the finished good. If this research stops at the molecule, then let various corps compete on turning the same molecule into a finished product, and let them patent the finished drug, but not the molecule itself.
In small molecule the second player can just copy. With vaccines this is harder but a lot of the risk is already gone. Development encompases everything from tox, to dosing, and there is much risk at every step of the procees. For small molecule the lead is going to get massive amounts of small variations made and tested to try to find the one that works: that's not coming from the research that lead to a paper with a hit.
