 All right, let's talk about vaccine profits. So everybody these days, everybody, almost everybody, shockingly, is complaining about vaccine profits. There's one story that they've calculated that the three vaccine companies, the main ones, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna, are making a combined profit of $65,000 per minute, 24,000, 365 days a year. They come up with these ideas because they think they'll shock you, they take the total profitability, and they divide it by the number of minutes in a day. I wonder if that's just from the vaccines, but maybe it is. So vaccine companies are making a lot of money, primarily Pfizer that took no money from the government and basically refused to agree to the idea that it wouldn't sell the vaccines for profit, and it has been selling vaccines for profit throughout. And Stefan, I'll get to your question in a minute. It's on California, but it came in late. And it's been making money from day one. Of course, the other complaint is that almost none of the vaccines are going to low-income countries. Moderna and Pfizer are almost exclusively selling the vaccines in high-income countries, the United States, Europe, Israel, places like that. Very little of the vaccine is going to, I think it's something like, from Moderna less than 1% for Pfizer, it's more like 1%. Partially, that's because the US government and many of the European governments bought the vaccines in advance. They paid in advance for the vaccines. Pfizer was paid in advance for the vaccines, and if it didn't deliver the vaccines, it would have had to repay the money. I don't think it actually got the money. It's just got to guarantee that they would buy XML. Moderna got a lot of money from the government as part of Operation Warped Speed, but it did not, as far as I can tell, it did not also promise not to make money. AstraZeneca, on the other hand, promised that it would sell the vaccines early on for no profit, although it now has also changed and its new pricing establishes a profit for them as well. And I've read a report from Oxfam, and Oxfam is these companies are monopolies. They're making these exorbitant profits at all of our expense, and this is a travesty, and they should be sending all this profit, should be in deploying vaccines for free all over the world, and who the hell are these evil, basically evil pharmaceutical companies? And you know, I'd expect that from Oxfam. The altruism to guilt the companies to try to elicit guilt from us so that we blame the companies for how awful their behavior is. But as I've said in the past, and I will repeat now, good for the vaccine companies. Now people have come back and said, but they're making the money off of the government. Yeah. They're making the government off the money off the government. Who are they going to make it off of? Right? You know, free market insurance companies would be buying vaccines and probably buying them in advance and providing an incentive for vaccine companies to produce vaccines. Well, we don't live in a free market. We don't. That's the reality, guys. And the government basically has banned the ability for anybody else to buy vaccines except for the government. Only governments can buy vaccines. So of course, the vaccine, the companies are making money off of government. Who else would they make it off of? They're banned by law for making money off of anybody else because they can't sell it in a marketplace. Now you could argue about whether they'd make less or more money in an actual marketplace. Hard to tell. I can make arguments either way. But the idea of resenting them for making money is bizarre and absurd. There is nothing here. There is nothing here. I mean, vaccine makers. Now it's also true. Here's the other truism, that to the extent of vaccines are being mandated. You say, well, they've got a captured market. Yes, they have a captured market. And that's wrong. Just like it's wrong for the government to buy the vaccines. Just like it's wrong for the government to have had warp speed. All of this is wrong. But this is the world we live in. The complaints should be against government for mandating the vaccines, for funding the vaccines. The complaints should be against government for not allowing the marketplace to work, not allowing me to buy a vaccine directly from the vaccine companies. The complaints should be against our socialist economic system. The complaints should be against a mixed economy. We should be advocating for laws of the fair. But given that these companies produced one of the most amazing products in human history, a vaccine in less than 12 months, indeed, in less than six months, really, if you take out the FDA nonsense, in less than six months, of course, they should make money. And they should make a fortune. And in a free market, they would make a fortune. And in a free market, we should be celebrating it. And yes, it's distorted and provoked by government. OK, let's go after government. Let's go after the vaccine mandates. Let's complain bitterly about the government involvement in the vaccines. That does not change the science. It does not change the achievement. It does not change the technology. You are nine to 10 times more likely to die of COVID if you're not vaccinated than if you are. The vaccine protects you from hospitalization, from death. And from getting the virus just not as well as we'd hoped, and certainly not with the latest variants of the virus, Delta and now Omicron. But what Delta would have done to us without vaccines is hard to imagine in terms of the number of deaths. So I get it that the left is complaining about this. They hate profits. They hate business. They believe vaccines would have appeared out of no way anyway. They have no respect for science. They have no respect for technology. They have no respect for business. They have no respect for what it takes to develop an mRNA platform, what it takes to develop an mRNA vaccine. No respect for it. So I expect this from the left. What is shocking to me is the number of people who in most circumstances claim to be pro-technology, pro-progress, pro-business, who are anti-vaccines, anti-vaccine profits, and claim that the drug companies are manipulating the whole health care system to prevent the health care system from offering other cures in order to sell their vaccines. They're suppressing cures that could have saved their lives. So drug companies are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people because they are actively suppressing the use of other medications that would have saved us all. That is just horrific. It's horrific given the science, given the stats, given the evidence of how efficacious these vaccines will be. I'll get to your question in a minute. It plays right into the hands of the left. It plays right into the hands of people who would like to shut down these big pharma companies, who would like to transfer all of it into the NIH. If drug companies, incentives, if the way they behave is the same as government, why have them at all? If you are willing to trash all of medicine because of government intervention in medicine, then good luck to you. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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