It’s a race to see what will come first for Covid-19: a treatment or a vaccine.  Put your money on the treatment — there is no money in vaccines.

Drug companies can charge whatever the fuck they want for a treatment — it will cost whatever the market will bear.  The 1-percent will bear a lot to keep mama off a ventilator.

But vaccines must be shared with the world. They don’t work unless they are available to (almost) all — regardless of ability to pay.  Governments call that kind of shit a utility, mandate it, and pay as little as possible for it.

There’s a government program going on right now to find a treatment or a vaccine.  The name (I shit you not) is Operation Warp Speed.  Apparently, it is being run by the new Space Force.

No seriously, it’s a group out of the US federal Health and Human Services. God help us this is what bullshit government acronyms have come to — Star Trek references run amok.

Governments around the world will pump billions into vaccine research.  They may or may not come up with one.  No vaccine for the common cold yet, and Coronavirus is like a cold virus — it will keep mutating and mutating to stay ahead of most vaccines.

Treatments will get their share of government funding too.  But there are long tails of revenue for steroids, or ozone  (not kidding the shit that blocks the sun’s radiation, may also kill viruses) or even transferring in blood from survivors.  There’s gold in them there bags of blood.

Vaccines may eventually “cure” the problem — as long as we keep the anti-vaccers at bay. But cures are bad for business.  It’s self-eliminating the customer.  No financial advisor worth his salt will invest in a health-care business that plans to cure all of its customers as soon as possible.  That strategy is corporate suicide.

Governments will eventually stop funding it too and beg Bill Gates to finish the “cure.”  That’s how it went with small pox and polio. It took nearly 400 years to eliminate small pox after the vaccine was known.  Almost 70 years for the polio vaccine “to succeed.”

With “warp speed” kicking in, we might get a treatment approved in months.  It may take years to find out whether it actually works, but by then, the Pharma companies will be on to the next warp speed miracle.

No wonder the CEO of Novartis is grinning like a fool:

Stole the image from this video story.  Didn’t watch the whole video — I’ll wait for the text story so I can scan it quicker.

This isn’t new with Corona.  Bio-tech has been fleeing vaccine research for years.

Better to fund a diagnostic test than a vaccine.  There’s money in the tests and no liability.  Hardly anybody has every died from bleeding a little bit in a tube or spitting in a cup.

Want to see what’s in your DNA?  People will pay and pay.  But that does little or nothing to make you “better.”

But put a less deadly copy of a virus into people’s bloodstream, and a small number of people are going to get sick, and a few may die.  (Shut the fuck up about autism — that story is internet Bullshit at it’s best).

Vaccines are a lawyer’s class-action lawsuit wet dream.  Treatments can work for a lawsuit in a pinch, but the lawyers can’t touch a diagnostic test.  Even if it gives you the wrong results.

Before any treatments or vaccines, we are going to get better, faster and more expensive diagnostic tests.  For the next year, the cash will be in who can develop the best test at the least cost and charge the most for it.

Testing strategies that cost 5 cents or less than $5 around the world will cost $100 or $200 in the US through 2021, as the testing companies look to stuff themselves now as they race to be the first to find a “treatment.”  Not a cure or a vaccine — there’s no money in “the cure.”