5 ms·
A major reason that this happened so fast is due the US government’s operation warp speed program. Moderna worked with NIAID on this vaccine closely, and the u
by blhack 6y ago
A major reason that this happened so fast is due the US government’s operation warp speed program.
Moderna worked with NIAID on this vaccine closely, and the us gov funded it without regard for if it actually worked or not.
So it’s funding...but it seems extremely unlikely that we would fund most other diseases this way. The way warp speed works is that the federal government funds the vaccine even if it doesn’t work. This allows the drug maker to work faster because they don’t have to worry about losing billions of dollars on a vaccine that does nothing. The federal government eats the risk.
It’s was a really good strategy for the vaccine development and I think the federal team deserves a lot of credit for where we are with the vaccines.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoGetting downvoted for giving Trump credit even where it’s due. Yikes.
- blhack 6y agoThe thing is: I’m not even giving trump credit here. There are hundred or maybe even thousands of people working in the federal government on warp speed.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoBut you should know better than to have anything other than total condemnation for anything even adjacent to the Trump administration! If people react this strongly to something as non-controversial and objectively true, it’s no wonder that people might be suspicious about some vote tally accuracy in certain critical districts.
- zzzeek 6y ago"Fauci also told CNN that Trump has not attended a meeting of the White House coronavirus taskforce in months. CNBC has reached out to the White House for comment." get real. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-with-biden-transition-team-on-coronavirus.html?__source=google%7Ceditorspicks%7C&par=google https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-w...
- NDizzle 6y agoMostly peaceful downvotes.
- boringg 6y agoYou for real? That guy has caused the outbreak to skyrocket by politicizing science. The research for the vaccine would have been driving intensely fast without his efforts given the scale of the problem and the opportunity to help one of the more acute problems humanity has faced before. Additionally if you cause/exacerbated the problem you can't be credited for fixing it.
- boringg 6y agoReally? This got downvoted - must be more Mr. T believers lurking in here than I thought.
- zzzeek 6y agomaybe not as the "warp speed" program is being prevented from interacting with the incoming administration who will be in charge of administering it, all for petty political reasons. this will likely cost tens of thousands more lives. pfizer did not participate in "warp speed" at all as they wisely determined that the federal government is completely corrupt for the time being. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-with-biden-transition-team-on-coronavirus.html?__source=google%7Ceditorspicks%7C&par=google https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-w...
- blhack 6y agoWhat does this have to do with the news that this vaccine was developed so quickly? Regardless of if the program evaporates in January, the vaccine won’t.
- boringg 6y agoIt would mean all the work to prevent a vaccine would be undone by not disseminating the vaccine to the public. The end results are the metrics of success.
- blhack 6y agoThe vaccine isn't owned by the federal government. It's owned by these private companies. The Trump administration cannot prevent the vaccine from being disseminated to the public neither here in the US, or in the rest of the world.
- JamesBarney 6y agoPfizer chose not to participate in operation warp speed because they thought filling out the required federal paperwork would slow them down. It had nothing to do with any perceived corruption.
- zzzeek 6y agoHere's the CEO of Pfizer explciitly telling a journalist on the record they wanted to stay out of the "politics" of the program, which I think the non-naive reader can tell exactly what that means; they certainly would not announce that the very government they rely upon for drug approvals is "corrupt", they correctly identified that Trump has turned every US program into his own personal quid-pro-quo machine and they wanted no part of it: > "When you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how we are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports," he finished. "And also, I wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics, by the way." https://www.newsweek.com/pfizer-avoided-rd-funding-trumps-operation-warp-speed-because-bureaucracy-politics-1546110 https://www.newsweek.com/pfizer-avoided-rd-funding-trumps-op...
- tzs 6y agoDon't forget other countries. Warp Speed is a mix of R&D funding and of guarantees to purchase a given number of doses if the vaccine is approved. Some companies get both, some just get a purchase guarantee. (I don't know if any got R&D funding without a purchase guarantee). The EU has been doing commitments to purchase if approved with substantial down payments to promote R&D. Japan has been doing purchase commitments, but I don't know if they have paid any upfront. For Moderna, they got both a lot of upfront R&D funding and large purchase commitments from Warp Speed. They got a large purchase commitment from the EU. For Pfizer, they got no R&D funding from Warp Speed but a 100 m purchase commitment. From the EU they got a 300 m purchase commitment and a big down payment. They got a 120 m dose commitment from Japan. AstraZenica got a big down payment in the EU and a large dose commitment, and they got R&D funding and a large dose commitment from Warp Speed. I believe this is how it is going with all the major COVID vaccine efforts.