Flu vaccine futures market

Sometimes the brilliance and foresight of fellow male lesbian bloggers Philadelphia liberal drinkers is absolutely astounding. Yesterday, we were discussing the merits of a vaccine futures market. "Better than Enron"..."Buck Fush"..."we could all be millionaires overnight"..."Worst. President. Ever."..."the wisdom of the free market is limitless"..."impeach Bush" was heard all-round. None of us really thought it could be done, but we certainly saw it as a novel idea that probably no one else had thought of yet. Eh-WTF-hem, no one until now (or maybe no one until four days from now judging from how this is a Jan. 15th article, which makes this idea even more foresightful).

The best solution is to develop futures markets where contracts for future deliveries of large batches of common vaccines are bought and sold. Futures markets were developed specifically to smooth wide swings in supply and demand. Farmers, for example, reduce their risk by selling grain before it is planted. Prices for futures contracts help farmers decide how much to plant. The development of these sophisticated global markets has helped eliminate famine in wealthy countries.

Well, certainly no one goes hungry in the US, though I'm not so sure about those socialist chocolate-producing Olde-E countries. I'll have my broker place June 2010 puts for avian flu and January 2025 calls for AIDS vaccines.

OK, OK, the idea is only for standard vaccines like those targeting influenza. So let's say this might actually work--and it might, given the nature of how the flu vaccine in particular exhibits a somewhat predictable yearly demand while it is subject to yearly supply shortages due to problems with antigen prediction--would pharmaceutical companies actually be willing to participate in this market? It seems that unless the government sets up this market and forces companies to participate in it, the few companies that produce standard vaccines wouldn't want to participate in this sort of market. In that case, this would become a government-run market much like the current system of financing those companies willing to produce standard vaccines, except that some outside players might profit from this trading. Am I wrong?