3 ms·
At a billion doses per year it’s still 8 years to manufacture the vaccine for everyone. That’s assuming no supply chain issues. Moderna needs 2 doses which mean
by remote_phone 6y ago
At a billion doses per year it’s still 8 years to manufacture the vaccine for everyone. That’s assuming no supply chain issues. Moderna needs 2 doses which means only 500M protected per year which pages it to 16 years. I think the Oxford vaccine needs only 1 doses but because it uses a weakened virus there’s a chance a person develops covid-19.
Then you need to administer something like 300 doses per second globally, if you have 1B doses.
This is also assuming the virus doesn’t mutate during that time (it mutates very slowly but it could still happen).
The vaccine really needs to give multi-year protection otherwise it won’t be viable in the long run.
- yosito 6y agoIs a billion doses a year an arbitrary number?
- 2trill2spill 6y agoI'm not sure about Oxford but for Moderna a billion doses a year is accurate[1]. [1]: https://cen.acs.org/business/outsourcing/Moderna-picks-Lonza-make-1-billion-doses-of-its-coronavirus-vaccine/98/web/2020/05 https://cen.acs.org/business/outsourcing/Moderna-picks-Lonza...
- bufferoverflow 6y agoIt doesn't mean they can't produce significantly more doses than that.
- govg 6y agoTo be honest, there is probably a power law graph in play here when it comes to how many people are infective and infect others. If we can vaccinate / prevent spread in the demographics that are prone to mixing a lot / threaten spread, we can quickly curb it and then focus on people who are less likely to contract it / spread it around.
- stallmanite 6y agoIt feels like some of the demographics most likely to spread have overlap with groups unlikely to accept vaccinations. Source: Live in Lansing MI where the nutty politicization of this issue is out of hand and there are redneck “anti-mask” protests seemingly once a month.
- jberryman 6y agoThis is certainly the case. I don't have a link, but one study suggested 80% of cases were from "super-spreading" events, with one person infecting many others.
- fiftyfifty 6y agoModerna's vaccine does not require two doses, they administered two doses as part of their phase 2 trials to test for adverse reactions. They are only doing a single 100 µg dose for their phase 3 trials, and it's likely that will be the dose in the final vaccine: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-finalizes-design-phase-3-covid-19-vaccine-trial-ahead-july-start https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-finalizes-desi... Moderna has plans to be able to manufacturer 1 billion doses a year. AstraZeneca has announced plans to manufacturer 2 billion doses a year, with plans to produce 300 million doses by the end of 2020. The Chinese firms Sinopharm and Sinovac are ramping up their production right now, and will produce 200-300 million doses by the end of 2020. With all the other firms developing a vaccine it seems highly likely we could produce enough vaccine to vaccinate the entire population of the Earth in a single year. Now distributing and administering that much vaccine is another story, but manufacturing will not likely be the bottle neck.
- remote_phone 6y agoThey absolutely need 2 doses. That is how they have been conducting all their tests. Read the last line of the article you linked. Also based on the results from the study, two doses are necessary because one dose didn’t elicit a strong enough result but two did.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWhat would it take to ramp that up? The flu shot only lasts a year (for entirely different reasons, but still!), and in that case, we actually need to adapt the drug itself each season.
- kyriakos 6y agoIt doesn't actually use covid-19 virus so i doubt there's a chance of developing the disease from the vaccine. maybe it will have other side effects but covid-19 won't be one of them.