Now undoubtedly many of you are going to dismiss this as corporate propagana, but I think that, given the amount of money that various NPOs and government organizations are throwing at the problem, this represents a signifigant risk for the corporations- afterall, if an NPO or government agency finds a viable vaccine before them, all the money they've put into R&D is wasted.
This is normal. It is routine for companies to face competition which make the race a simple first past the post. It really doesn't matter if the competition is private or public. The bigger problem is the science. HIV is so ridiciously infidelitious that even if you win the vaccine race, nature may well be a bitch and render your vaccine useless in a matter of months/years.
And how are they going to make this huge profit Mr. Arrogant Bueracrat?
Manufacturing margin. Let's assume that the vaccine is cheap enough that the WHO or whatever can afford to go for mass vaccination. In order to get useful herd immunity you will need to vaccinate well over 3/4ths of the planet (HIV is asymptomatic for years in many patients), such an undertaking will require years if not decades so you will need to account for new births and the like. Even if the manufacturers only net 50 cents a dose that is huge money merely for manufacturing the crap.
They won't own the rights to it if a government agency or a NPO discovers the cure first- which is probably the reason, aside from the volitile nature of the virus itself, why they're not investing more money in the search for a vaccine.
Vacccines are unusual medicines, their target population is the healthy and to be effective they have to be liberally administered to whole populations. Even asssuming that an HIV vaccine was a one dose for life, the necessary eradication campaign would dwarf the Polio and Smallpox campaigns. The number of doses needed will easily exceed world population and even unit profit measured in pennies will be lucrative. Sure profits will be less than if you owned the IP and simply got profit for holding that, but the margin (however slim) on an eradication campaign is still hefty money.
Nothing in life is free. Investing money in a research for a vaccine for AIDS is money that you don't have have to spend for research for another health problem- like the dozens of types of cancer that exist, or the development of new types of antibiotics. Given that there are countless health problems out there even .5% of total health spending is a huge RELATIVE investment of resources.
HIV/AIDS funding is the highest per patient of any major disease. To put it bluntly the NIH spent $31,381 per HIV/AIDS death and $1,129 per heart disease death. Granted those figures were for Americans in 1998, but even if we correct for worldwide incidence, HIV still receives disproportionate funding. Now funding shouldn't be strictly correlated to death count, some forms of medical research have broader applicability and some deaths may as well read "old age" where intervention to prevent the immediate cause of death will not greatly improve life expectancy or quality, but there should be a passing acquaintance between the two.
The real problem is not on the reward side nor that companies aren't putting out the money. Nor is it inherent to the nature of vaccines (Merck and GSK both are currently finishing off research on HPV vaccines). The problem is that HIV is possibly the most frigging difficult virus to develop a vaccine. In a typical AIDS patient the virus undergoes every
possible single point mutation every day. If there is a way for the virus to circumvent the vaccine, it
will be found. Eradication efforts will take decades (to date the grand total of diseases eradicated from the global human population stands at
one), given that type of timeframe and known mutation rates, anything but a silver bullet will ultimately fail. The corporate suits know this as well, an HIV vaccine would be a license to print money, but the odds of one panning out are vanishingly small.
If anything I think we are spending too much money on vaccination efforts. Because of the technical challenges and the inherent biological problems, much of the money being dumping into vaccine research I think would be far better spent on social programs. To an astonishing degree, responsible behavior works as a vaccine for HIV and thus far the money would have been far better spent working on the social rather than biological solution.
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
