Ridley: Government advance purchase commitments drove COVID mRNA vaccine breakthroughs
Matt Ridley · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · Mar 23, 2021 · at 41:28
Matt Ridley explains how outcome-based market incentives rather than top-down research grants catalyzed COVID-19 vaccine development.
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“Governments all around the world have said, look, if someone can come up with a vaccine for COVID-. We will buy You know, forty million doses, fifty million doses, whatever it is that has worked to produce a huge race among different companies, and the great thing about that is that the governments are not picking the winners. They are saying we will, I mean, they're picking some winners, but then they don't have to decide in advance which of these technologies for producing a vaccine will work, and as a result, it's very interesting, it has, Incentivized a new technology to come of age, that is to say, messenger RNA vaccines of the kind that Moderna and BioNTech were exploring before this.”
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