Profits selling what?

There's a classic Monty Python scene that I often think about (and have used a lot in this blog): What have the Romans ever done for us?

It ends with: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

I wish I had even a thousandth of the comedic genius of the Monty Python team in order to create a comparable line about science.  Something like, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has science ever done for us lately?"

Consider for a moment our lives without vaccines.  An example of what science has done for us.

It's been a great year for vaccine discovery:

- new malaria vaccine
- new dengue vaccine
- new RSV vaccines (the first)
- new pentavalent meningococcal vaccine
- new HPV vaccine

And I'm likely missing some.

— Saloni (@salonium) October 15, 2022

As a kid, I had only known about malaria.  Later, I learnt in school that there was something called a "yellow fever" that mosquitoes merrily spread.  Then dengue. Chikungunya.  Enough already!

I have been dreaming of a world without mosquitoes.  I won't miss them at all.  Instead of waging trillion dollar wars in which the US bombs the shit out of brown people, I have argued that the US should instead fund the development of anti-malarial vaccines that can vastly improve the quality of life of brown people.  Instead, we elected a white supremacist, who said brown people should stay back in their shitholes!

Yet, as I noted in this post more than a year ago, there is a ray of hope.  There is promise of a malaria vaccine.

For the first time, a vaccine has shown high efficacy in trials – preventing the disease 77% of the time among those receiving it. This is a landmark achievement. The WHO’s target efficacy for malaria vaccines is over 75%. Until now, this level has never been reached.

Now we are closer than ever to a real malaria vaccine, and is expected to be rolled out in 2023:

Crucially, say the scientists, their vaccine is cheap and they already have a deal to manufacture more than 100 million doses a year.

The charity Malaria No More said recent progress meant children dying from malaria could end "in our lifetimes".

What has science ever done for us lately, right?

What I don't understand is this: Why don't governments, especially in affluent countries, offer all the needed dollars and euros in order to develop other such vaccines? Why doesn't the public demand such an effort? Because big-pharma will make lots of money in the process? 

Think about this: Isn't vaccinating the world worth the money? 

Think about this too: America's most profitable company (and often one of the most profitable in the world) is not a pharmaceutical giant.  Nor is it a fossil fuel company. It is Apple.

Chances are that most people who yell and scream at big pharma raking in profits do that while using not one but many Apple devices!  As I wrote in 2013, Apple  has done such a masterful job in public relations that it is one company that is pretty much never, ever attacked. It is a multinational corporation that is the largest in the world with profit margins like you won't believe, yet it is rarely ever critiqued compared to the daily assaults on big pharma. 

What has big pharma ever done for us, right?