If the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
There are a number of costs that Moderna/Pfizer/Astrazenica incur that a homebrew vaccine does not. Of the top of my head:
1. Salaries for the (presumably highly educated) lab techs that put this stuff together. I don’t know johnswentwort background, but presumably he wouldn’t exactly be asking minimum wage if he was doing this commercially.
2. Costs of running large scale trials and going through all the paperwork to get FDA approval. I think I’m generally more in favour of organisations like the FDA than a lot of people
here, but even I expect this to be a very non-insignificant number.
3. Various taxes and costs of shipping/storing the vaccine until it can get to customers.
4. Costs of liability and a desire for the company to make a profit on this (as well as to pay the salaries for the all of the people needed to keep a large company running).
Given all that I don’t think the gap between this and the commercial vaccines is that insane.
Similarly:
Randal Munroe