A fascinating, and very depressing, story from the NYTimes. Convinced that markets, supply and demand, and voluntary production would be insufficient to protect us from a bioterror attack, the government took on the job, and project BioShield was born.
Assuming that markets could never fill the need, the project was originally intended to ensure the production of vaccines and drugs by granting exclusive government contracts to produce these goods. It has since degenerated into political infighting and rent-seeking by companies that might otherwise occupy themselves in filling an actual market demand for treatment and prevention should there be a bioterror attack. Five years after the anthrax attacks, the government has made us no safer and no better prepared. Neither have the drug and vaccine companies. As is obvious from the article, they’ve found better, and more profitable, things to do with their time. Time, talent, money, knowledge, and resources that could be used to protect people and cure deadly diseases are instead being wasted, siphoned off by rent-seeking because the government needs to…protect us.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/5632/maybe-what-we-really-need-is-a-vaccine-against-rent-seeking/
Maybe what we really need is a vaccine against rent-seeking
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Actually, we should be eternally grateful that they haven’t been able to put more research funds into vaccines. This is mostly because vaccines are completely useless and extremely dangerous.
There is no such thing as pathogenic viruses, if there were, doctors would die off within months of starting their supposedly noble profession, in fact, as viruses cannot be killed (as they are not technically alive), no form of life could possibly survive at all if pathogenic viruses existed.
Of course there are plenty of other anomalies in the ridiculous viral theory, for example, how some viruses are able to mutate all the time, but others have not mutated in a hundred years. Or the fact that some viral ‘epidemics’ come and go without herd immunity or vaccination programmes (such as SARS), or the fact that supposedly contagious viral particles are found in practically all people (such as chicken pox or herpes).
Just to address one specific point.
The reason that some viruses, such as measles, rarely mutate, is because they are composed of a DNA double strand, making their replication process much more stable.
On the other hand, RNA viruses, such as influenza, are composed of a single strand, making them liable to mutation every year.
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