Meh. Not much. None of the companies really want to do it anymore. Vaccine development is just not compatible with capitalism. Remember that even mass vaccination campaigns are generally only 1-5 lifetime doses. Behind every newly-scheduled vaccines (something that happens every 5-10 years) there are 1000s of research avenues that went nowhere, or nowhere lucrative. They cost to develop, test, deploy etc. And the benefit is dispersed, in the future, and not obvious to individuals. A quintessential collective good; must be done at scale.

Look into the Ebola vaccine: it was 90% ready to go for a decade and almost ended up in the same situation as the Lyme vaccine: abandoned because no pharmaceutical business (or military) was willing to pay for the costs of the final approval processes. There is FINALLY a malaria vaccine.

If vaccines were developed as ambitiously as they could be imagine what we could have them for: acne, UTIs, ear infections, common cold, STIs, cold sores, h pylori, MRSA, c diff, parasites, a real TB vaccines, HepC, HIV etc. And that is just thinking about life here in chilly first world nations. Last few years have seen an uptick of finally approved vaccines for tropical diseases like chikungunya and dengue fever which is great.

none of that shit will be profitable

Or theres a “treatment” that ends up being a subscription plan on your lofe thats even more profitable.

I hope China can put them all to shame to the point the world can ignore it and our companies are forced to assimulate.

lol I mentioned that just down the thread.

My understanding is that development was encouraged by the US military because they were worried about bio terrorism. The September 11 Never Forget anthrax attacks were not yet totally forgotten about. There was a case where a critically ill man flew to Texas(?) where he was admitted to hospital, staff didn’t realize they needed to follow strict contact precautions, and a nurse contracted Ebola which she died of. As did the patient. It caused a panic because people realized Ebola may not be confined to “over there” and worried what if extremely sick Africans started coming to the US maliciously?? They could go to the mall or anything and infect all kinds of people. So it became salient to actually develop a vaccine to this disease because now white/wealthy people could be at risk. It became a a National Security issue and military $$$ got involved.

So researchers that had been toiling away for decades suddenly got an influx of money and attention. Since a lot of the groundwork was already done, they quickly developed a vaccine which was effective in humans. But when it came time to finalize the approvals by like filling in the forms, dotting the is, crossing the ts, doing the final study, resources were pulled. Americans weren’t afraid of Bio Terrorism any more. Now that the problem was back to only affecting Black people in Africa it didn’t seem to be a priority so who cares.

I remember hearing about this in the time between the development of the vaccine and its approval. Scientists saying “we have this, its ready to go!” Of course they are trying to court favor with people more powerful than themselves, not be firebrands, but the frustration was very clear.

In many ways the story is the same as the Lyme vaccine. Ebola is a way worse disease 10000x but why should we have any diseases?

And people think too many vaccines is the conspiracy. Hey everyone: it’s too few vaccines.

(Not even starting about distribution.)

And lymes can cause joint pain anyway