The cycle of greed wasn't needed to develop the polio vaccine. This was publicly funded, historically more advances in medicine are made by people interested in science and the public good rather than corporate profit.
The polio vaccine was fairly easy to discover. Give someone a weakened or dead version of the polio virus, and they develop antibodies, and they don't get sick when exposed to the full virus.
We are past the age when one guy running a small lab can just decide to cure something. It's going to take lots of money and lots of researchers and lots of false leads to find each new thing, and even after that there are going to be lots and lots of tests.
