Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

So the federal government gave $2.5 billion to moderna and they gave almost a billion of it to their CEO?

 

Which is fine, and I don't object to the company getting paid. I just have trouble believing that whatever their CEO did to facilitate it was worth a billion dollars.

 

How much did Salk earn?

 

How much was what they delivered worth? (HINT: One HELLUVA lot more than $2.5 billion).

Also ... Robert Reich is the absolute fucking KING of idiotically informed hot takes.

 

I think Reich is a smart guy who fell in love with the accolades of social media. Every tweet gets cranked up to 11.

I call it Krugman’s Diesease.

 

It’s only like $4 million in cash.

The rest of it is tied to company stock, which understandably skyrocketed in the last few years.

 

I don't think he's a dummy, either, but if all one had to go on were his Tweets ...

Nevertheless, Tweet or no Tweet .. the absolute lead-pipe-cinch reality is that Moderna's owners paid him (?) that money. It's coming out of their pockets.

And even if he walked away with every fucking cent of that $2.5 billion, that's got to have been one of the best bargains in the history of government contracting.

 

Salk didn't even patent his vaccine. If he made bank it was on the demand for his words that followed.

 

There's a little more to it than that, but all signs indicate there was no push for profit.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/the-real-reasons-jonas-salk-didnt-patent-the-polio-vaccine.html

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/18/monkeypox-faq/

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/25/biden-administration-monkeypox-public-health-emerg

 

China reportedly just locked down 1m people in Wuhan due to the next/newest variant.