On August 09 2025 23:35 oBlade wrote:On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:On August 08 2025 22:06 oBlade wrote:On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
Also my uncle is alive because he got an mrna shot to treat his cancer.
That is fantastic. I'm glad your uncle is alive.
Is it the only treatment he got? Is he the only one that got it? Because obviously the US government can't afford $500 million per life saved, so please expand the anecdote or its significance.
On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
The idea that curing cancer going to profitable to pharma companies is silly.
What is this sentence supposed to mean?
Are you saying pharma companies are intentionally keeping people sick with cancer to get more money? Or curing cancer would be a loss for them? I don't see how any company that "cured" cancer wouldn't be worth over a trillion dollars overnight.
On August 08 2025 20:02 Sermokala wrote:
The misconception that research dollars invested should be diverted to only known technologies and science is very ignorant and not how any of this works.
This is a great rebuttal to something I haven't seen argued.
It is a mistake to presuppose that the word "research" necessitates any government anything whatsoever. The research isn't banned, is it? If it's so promising, why does it
need public dollars? If it's such a long shot, why would it
deserve public dollars? Stuck on level 1 if this can't be answered.
Nor is mRNA unknown anyway. Billions of doses worldwide. Should we fund it just because it'd be really nice if it worked out? There are thousands of proposed treatments for everything that have fallen by the wayside. Okay? Cost benefit. For example, it'd be really great if the world had a cheap source of nearly unlimited clean energy. It just so happens I'm working on it, it's called cold fusion. Do I deserve $10 billion in taxpayer funds, maybe not.
Yeah its the only one he got. Why would you think that he was the only one who would receive the treatment? Do you think that there wouldn't be other lives saved through the advancement of mrna shots? My uncle isn't rich or exceptional, but he was able to get a genetically tailored shot of tuberculosis that killed his cancer cells really well. If the funding didn't go through he would have to get radiation therapty and other worse treatments.
Curing cancer through one shot is less profitable than a series of treatments. Yes, it would be less profitable to cure cancer quickly instead of slowly over time. Why would a company be worth trillions of dollars if it only sells a cheap cure to a problem? If the government funds this research instead of a Pharma company that means that the patent can be used for the public good so we can have that cheap cure instead of an expensive series of treatments.
You have assumed for some reason that the one company with the competitive advantage of a cancer cure that was probably expensive to research would sell it cheap, and also that the cure is one shot. I have no idea why you have assumed that.
Your uncle's targeted therapy was probably not cheap, and it's not mass producible because his cancer and everyone's cancer are different.
If a company had a "cure" for cancer, either one-size or individually tailored, they would profit off it. Either could be more expensive than the other, but either way they would drive down the cost of competing alternative treatments.
Cancer sees no respite from this by the way as it's mRNA programs
for respiratory viruses that are being phased out.
On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:
Its exactly what you were arguing. If the government doesn't fund a line of R&D that doesn't show profitability, a private company won't pay for it either. It deserves public dollars beacuse it potentially can be something. The greatest innovations and leaps in science come from public funding of things that don't make sense for a private business to fund. Dwarf wheat, or what you think wheat is, only was discovered to be so good beacuse some random guy was testing every kind of wheat he could find to see what would work best. If you have Cargill funding this research, this technology never makes it to India and pakistan, after Dwarf wheat spread to the subcontinent the wars between them stopped.
Yes, the government should fund broad simple research that isn't directly investible or translatable as a big project. Dwarf wheat didn't cost half a billion. The point you're making has to face scale differences here.
On August 09 2025 15:05 Sermokala wrote:
Like yeah, if you can make experiments about cold fusion the government should be putting those billiosn to it, it would make everything a lot better. thats how cold fusion has been developed so far. Mrna vaccines were only created beacuse there was such insane funding given to it by the public. Even in the middle of the plague the government had to fund the research to cure it. Was there not enough of a profit motive for big pharma to fund it before the plague? Would it have been great to have mrna tech before it was needed? If it turned out so well for the covid vaccine why didn't the private sector fund the research into it?
Yes cost benifit, great argument. If there was an agency that could generate 3 dollars for every dollar invested should we fund that? If cold fusion only cost 100 billion we should pay that instantly. You only get to cold fusion though by spending money on thousands of lines of research that lead nowhere. One potential line is by generating the fuel in orbit useing solar panels uninhibited by the atmosphere, and then bringing it down to earth.
Cold fusion hasn't been developed. It's not going to be developed. It's a complete pseudoscientific scam.
"Generating the fuel in orbit using solar panels uninhibited by the atmosphere" is something so divorced from reality it makes me feel cruel for having vastly overestimated what I'm dealing with. Solar power is not cold fusion. Solar power is good, which makes it different than cold fusion. Solar panels create electricity, which is different than cold fusion devices, which do not create electricity, but can be measured to create electricity if you plug them into a wall outlet. Solar panels in space are good at powering things - if the things they are powering are also in space. Otherwise spending millions to billions of dollars making solar farms in orbit and beaming shit with lasers is not more efficient than just putting panels on Earth. Every cent on cold fusion is PURE waste. So the government shouldn't be the one wasting. Every cent spent on putting a solar panel in orbit and beaming the electricity can give you electricity, but is nonetheless a waste because money is limited and you can get the electricity by using the same money to put far more solar panels on the ground.
mRNA vaccines for covid were something the government and pharma
had no choice but to do. It's not ideal at all. Ideal would be the government having funded non-mRNA vaccine programs for SARS/coronaviruses over the previous 2 decades so we would have been at a better starting point when the pandemic broke out. As it is, they made a therapy with nonnegligible side effects that possibly cuts your chance of getting the virus in half for a few months. That's fine. And now we have it. Now we need other things.
On August 09 2025 16:54 Acrofales wrote:
E: and I forgot to connect this back to mRNA research. Do I think public funding is needed for mRNA vaccine research? I don't know. I am not a medical researcher. Nor are you, Sermokala, and most importantly, nor is RFK. Mostly public funding is approved or denied by a panel of established researchers who evaluate the project based on a number of criteria. Some of those criteria are political, but I can't think of any other bans on the use of technology for idealist reasons. The only one that springs to mind was W's ban on stemcell research. And it was criticized by many many people, including myself, at the time. But at least the ethical argument was clear at the time. That argument doesn't even exist in the case of mRNA vaccines. It is a ban based on RFK's personal dislike of the topic. And that is not a reason funding should be cut.
You are appealing to an authority on the basis of their imaginarily unassailable integrity as being part of the system. A researcher will always be biased towards research. A rocket scientist will always be biased towards rockets. A bridge builder will always be biased towards bridges. That's fine but there's a limit when spending someone else's money. So who watches the researchers? Oversight? HHS
is the system. RFK
is the expert. You don't have the luxury of saying you're just a layman, you have the obligation to listen to what a government agency says and then learn actually more about it. Because it's not a "personal dislike" by him it's a determination by multiple people that they are not good enough for public money to continue to pursue when it comes to respiratory viruses. Put it this way, the $500 million covers 22 mRNA vaccine programs for respiratory viruses. Why couldn't we get away with 21 before? Why would 23 be superfluous?
EPT
