Technology is always pushed by states, not small companies. Small companies can figure out how to market and reduce costs, but have never successfully created new, advanced technology.
No, that's a great example of what I'm saying. The vaccine is payed for by states - they had a 100% guaranteed worldwide market. Whether they invested their own money (like BioNTech) or were explicitly financed by a state (like Moderna and Pfizer), the money for that research will ultimately be payed almost entirely by the state.
Guaranteed wealthy clients are equivalent to investors. They're actually better, because you don't have to pay them back.
One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free market, no one would have been crazy enough to invest in it.
Guaranteed wealthy clients and investors exist in free markets too. That doesn’t make them Tech creators, that merit is still reserved to the startup itself.
Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.
If you have guaranteed clients, you're not selling on a free market. This is one of the reasons why you can't have have (healthy) free markets in medicine in general.
And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
States are making monopolies with their militaries. I don't need a state to buy the vaccine, actually I signed up for a private vaccination, and I would pay significantly more than the states, but states are given priority because of their power.
That's irrelevant, because whoever you are, you have much less money than the US and the EU and the UK and [...].
Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine without specialized medical care, so even if people could buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which most people in most of the world get from the state anyway.
