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But a large part of that value was captured by the customer (ie not an externality).
The argument for eliminating liability is that the cost benefit to the individual is negative (otherwise pharma could raise the cost to account for liability while customers would still buy since positive EV) but the benefit to society is positive.
Of course there could be an elasticity issue but that implies the cost to vaccines are much higher compared to what people think.
If the vaccine manufacturer is not capturing all the benefit of the vaccine but is liable for all the downside, it's clear that the math isn't mathing even for plainly good vaccines.
Just to expand, the three theoretical cases where liability prevents a valuable good from being produced is where there is a large positive externality (ie a benefit derived by neither the seller nor buyer such that the buyer is not willing to pay more), ability to pay for buyers, or where liability isn’t properly measured (eg the Bronx jury). Before we accept that the case applies here, we ought to actually prove it out. After all, vaccines didn’t have immunity from liability until the 1980s
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That just isn’t correct. The vast majority of manufacturers are subject to strict liability and they don’t capture all of the benefit. Yet they survive because they make an EV+ product.
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