Both manufacturers and legislators are going to be thinking about their future prospects as well as present prospects.
In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it."
I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.
In that case, maybe the media and academia could use its narrative making power to convince people to believe in and repeat something useful. They clearly are able to promote falsehoods or unsubstantiated wishful thinking to the level of widely accepted truths with institutional backing, if needed. Maybe they should then convince people that incentivizing companies to make vaccines exactly when they are most needed is a good thing. That it's true should make it easier job than it usually is.
In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it."
I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.