Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

You think J&J or Merck or Pfizer is financing its R&D with bank loans? Those companies have been issuing bonds all around the world, even during the pandemic. There has been pretty healthy demand, particularly with the ECB, and now the Fed too, creating money from the ether to buy up corporate debt and suppress yields.

If the rationale is that the US can now control the vaccine if one of those five companies produces one first, it is more than offset by the fact that they essentially funneled capital away from a bunch of other companies that didn't win the graft game, theoretically at least making it harder for those others to attract capital, which makes the hunt for a vaccine less robust.

On top of it, the flip side to what you are sayng is that with the U.S. government involved, it also makes it so that they can limit its distribution to other countries, and the pharma companies that are most likely to have success in developing a vaccine are not (and should not be) arms of the U.S. government and Donald Trump's corrupt whims.

The choice of these five companies was not entirely based on the science, what looks most promising, etc. Things that a market would focus on in deciding where to allocate capital. I have a suspicion that Sanofi which was putting a ton of work into this, for example, got voted off the Island because it is a French company. According to things I have read, it also appears their major criteria was who was promising they could have zillions of doses ready on some unrealistic time table -- i.e. -- the manufacturing process, and not on who had the most promising science.

The chances are high that this "Warp Speed" corruption proves to have been a collosal waste of money, with the debt being left behind for all of us. It's bad enough that people won't revisit it and learn from it. But they certainly won't consider the unseen consequence of the misallocated capital being prevented from reaching more productive uses.