Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?

I think we'd be better off is we shifted R&D to academia. Sure there's a fuck ton of bureaucracy in universities, but maybe then our tax dollars will be put to good use, and people learn.

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation

Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs

While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.

Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.

Orrr, hear me out, we can be angry right now without any prep, put in a comment about big corpo greed, and move on the to next Lemmy post.