Thread by @thekaipullai

I love how people on Twitter are deciding, with patently false data, on how much profit a company should make.

I am pretty sure they would also be OK with the govt deciding and fixing what their salary should be and how much they should earn in a month.

Pricing a Vaccine depends on a lot of inputs. The manufacturing facilities, the storage cost, the development costs etc. Do we know how much it costs to deactivate a virus? Do we know how much it takes to scale it up for production? The cost of trial & distribution.

Probably No

But we quickly jump the gun on heaping abuse on a company making profits

And it's not like as if people don't have options. They can get it for free at the State govt hospitals. The higher end is for private hospitals, which looks OK

But no, a company making profits is wrong

And making vaccines is tough. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be a 300 cr Vaccine manufacturing plant outside Chennai, rotting away in glory

Or Haffkine institute won't need 12 months to start manufacturing Covaxin, which is already being mass produced, when they have all the data

But we want to vilify private players

It's not as if the industrialists will take it home and spend it on a palace with an infinity pool. Most will reinvest, developing more facilities, and taking one more step towards Vaccine self sufficiency.

But some people don't want that

There was a ship whose engines refused to start. No matter what they did, the engines wouldn't start. As a last resort, they called this veteran shipping engineer to solve it.

He took a look at it, tapped a certain component, three times with a hammer.

The engines started.

Next day, he sent the shipping company an invoice of $20,000. The shipping company was aghast & asked him for a cost break up

He said, $1000 for tapping the hammer. $19000 for knowing where to tap

We should be grateful that we have people in this country, who know where to tap