3 ms·

If we had a long-term bottleneck here, there might be some possibility here, but then again if there were a long-term bottleneck we could just build more capaci

If we had a long-term bottleneck here, there might be some possibility here, but then again if there were a long-term bottleneck we could just build more capacity. However similar they are, I doubt you can just turn this on in a month or two without serious potential issues, and given how many people the vaccine is going into you have way more potential downside than potential upside. Which is really the issue with all potential fixes: either they are unknown and thus unacceptably risky for something we will use on hundreds of millions (or billions) of people, or if we take the time to get to acceptable risk it will be too late to really help with this issue.

Robotbeat 6y ago
We've had since February. That is checks watch an entire year now. Not just one or two months. And it's something we could've been doing in parallel with approval.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  Sure, and it would have been awesome if we had, BUT...this is, as I understand it, the very first case of an mRNA vaccine getting mass produced. There were literally scores of different vaccines, of a variety of technologies, being researched for this. I bet lots of vaccines were "ready" in February, the many of which did not pan out. If you had to bet on which one(s) to prep extra production for, mRNA is probably not (in February) what would have been picked.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    I would have picked it! In fact, when you’re faced with a civilization-wide once-in-a-century pandemic, you pick ALL of them. You invest billions of each. The top dozen get tens of billions. Each month, evaluate most promising approaches, and add more. I knew in February or March that the mRNA vaccines were extremely promising. NIH experts knew earlier than I did. The mRNA approaches had a head start because they had been studying MERS and SARS-1 before COVID-19. They hit the ground running once the sequence of the virus was released. It was known nearly immediately that they were promising approaches. That there were hyper-conservative uberskeptics that didn’t think so (and hadn’t actually been following such approaches in detail) and snootily spoke in the press about that doesn’t change what the real experts who were keeping abreast to the latest developments thought.

Robotbeat 6y ago

We've had since February. That is checks watch an entire year now. Not just one or two months. And it's something we could've been doing in parallel with approval.

rossdavidh 6y ago
Sure, and it would have been awesome if we had, BUT...this is, as I understand it, the very first case of an mRNA vaccine getting mass produced. There were literally scores of different vaccines, of a variety of technologies, being researched for this. I bet lots of vaccines were "ready" in February, the many of which did not pan out. If you had to bet on which one(s) to prep extra production for, mRNA is probably not (in February) what would have been picked.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  I would have picked it! In fact, when you’re faced with a civilization-wide once-in-a-century pandemic, you pick ALL of them. You invest billions of each. The top dozen get tens of billions. Each month, evaluate most promising approaches, and add more. I knew in February or March that the mRNA vaccines were extremely promising. NIH experts knew earlier than I did. The mRNA approaches had a head start because they had been studying MERS and SARS-1 before COVID-19. They hit the ground running once the sequence of the virus was released. It was known nearly immediately that they were promising approaches. That there were hyper-conservative uberskeptics that didn’t think so (and hadn’t actually been following such approaches in detail) and snootily spoke in the press about that doesn’t change what the real experts who were keeping abreast to the latest developments thought.