I’m the farthest thing from a communist, but what makes you think public funding cannot be given to drug research?

It can be, but who decides what to work on? Capitalism puts risk and reward off to the side, to be done by experts. Why take the risk if you have no reward, and, conversely, why give someone a load of money to allocate if there's no risk for them if it fails?

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binary132 12 hours ago | parent [-]

the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technologies is worth it even if it does not gain any material income?

Let’s also imagine the other side of the equation. Can you not imagine any penalty or cost other than bankruptcy? Let’s say you are forced to allocate $1 million per year to research. is the only cost function you can imagine based on the risk of default?

	▲	philipallstar 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would say your problem is the framing :) You're assuming an outcome because you know antibiotics work. What is the incentive to spend $10m on research for a particular drug? It's not "because we know it ends up in a cure for X", because we haven't done the research yet. It's "because we think this will reach enough people to be useful and we'll commit a lot to this thing vs lots of other options."