This is very good news for the wealthy, not so much for the average Joe - it will take a lot of time for this treatment to become cheap enough to be used at scale.
When penicillin was just introduced a week's course was about $100,000 in today's money. Today its better derivatives are sometimes given away for free.
That particular problem was solved by a mold-covered cantaloupe from Peoria, Illinois.
"After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process."
Reviewing a larger section of the wiki, the Peoria cantelope certainly seems to have helped.
"On March 14, 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal sepsis with US-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient, Anne Miller. By June 1942, just enough US penicillin was available to treat ten patients. In July 1943, the War Production Board drew up a plan for the mass distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. The results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the NRRL allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process. Pfizer scientist Jasper H. Kane suggested using a deep-tank fermentation method for producing large quantities of pharmaceutical-grade penicillin. Large-scale production resulted from the development of a deep-tank fermentation plant by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau. As a direct result of the war and the War Production Board, by June 1945, over 646 billion units per year were being produced."
It sure did, just pointing out that there was way more involved in engineering a cheap mass-manufacturing process than scavenging at markets. Somewhere near that section is a sentence on X-ray irradiation to induce mutations, just imagine the trial and error in that, and then these labour-intensive scaling experiments.
On the contrary, it’s a very, very good news for an average Joe. Every sufficiently advanced technology starts very expensive. Then capitalism and progress do their job, and it becomes available for masses.
The path to “make it cheaper” is generally easier than the path to “make it possible”.
Keep in mind $100 is the retail price, not the wholesale price (which is what's plotted on the above graph). I do not know what the current wholesale price is for a generic epi-pen.
My point is merely that the price is trending back down now that there's competition. And again, with insurance it's effectively free for most people - either through private insurance or medicaid.
- MRNA COVID vaccine patents weren’t open sourced or available for the third world but Cuba’s vaccine solutions are
- simple things like dental care aren’t offered in the US
I think you should replace “available for the masses” with available “to the middle classes” which may seem the same to the average HN reader but not the average inhabitant of our planet
> I think you should replace “available for the masses” with available “to the middle classes” which may seem the same to the average HN reader but not the average inhabitant of our planet
The statistics simply don't back you up, as not only do the middle classes make up the vast majority of people on the planet now, but those coming from poverty into the middle class is increasing. The much missed Hans Rosling goes through it here:
MRNA vaccines are not banned to sell in poorer countries. They are currently just too expensive for them, I suppose.
Once Moderna recoups the cost of R&D and pockets some profits, it will face the need to keep selling. With the pandemic basically over, they'll need to sell to wider markets, because they have the production capacity. They'll lower the price and try to use the economies of scale by selling large amounts.
The fact that any technological advances first become available to those who can pay a high initial price (not only in money) is pretty inevitable. If something is a runaway success, the price goes down with volume, and ideally with pressure from competition.
If you want to make something vitally important available at a low price, you have to find enough money to let the producers make some profit, or at least to recover the cost of development. If you don't, nobody will consider working on it, even if they wanted, because getting an investment would become impossible, and you can't do biotech on pocket money.
(You could of course force them work at gunpoint, but not being forced to work at gunpoint is usually even more vitally important for the health of a society.)
This should stop absolutely nobody from vaccinating.
From the article: "People face a much higher risk of developing myocarditis from Covid infection than the vaccines, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The risk of myocarditis from Covid is 100 times higher than developing the condition after Covid vaccination, according to a recent paper in Nature Reviews Cardiology."
