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Given a choice between producing enough doses in 1 month for $10 each, and producing enough doses over 10 months for $1 each, which would you prefer they do? T
by tlb 6y ago
Given a choice between producing enough doses in 1 month for $10 each, and producing enough doses over 10 months for $1 each, which would you prefer they do?
The cheap-slow version costs a million lives, and several billion extra man-months of lockdown, in return for a globally insignificant cost savings. Valuing lives at maybe $1000 each.
Increasing production 10x for 10x the cost is pretty typical of things where you build a lot of special-purpose equipment which is then worthless after the production run.
- jonplackett 6y agoThat isn't the calculation though. No-one is saying make it slower for less money. The Oxford vaccine is being rolled out fast, millions of doses available - actually millions more because, since they aren't so concerned with making money, India are able to make their own locally. This isn't a questions of scale - everyone is doing this at maximum scale. Some are just making more money from it than others. The Moderna one is more expensive because it's for-profit not because they've spent more money scaling up. If anyone knows otherwise let me know.
- tlb 6y agoWhat defines this supposed "maximum scale"? No manufactured product has ever been found to have a maximum scale. Many complex products are produced in the billions per month. The only limit is willingness to invest money to hire more people to build and run more factories in parallel. Those budgets were ultimately set by governments, unwilling to spend a few billion to save millions of lives and avoid trillions in economic damage.