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Here's a general article: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/11/covid19-vaccine-timeline-keeps-slipping-experts-say-it-will-change-again/ https://www.statnews.co

Here's a general article: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/11/covid19-vaccine-timeline-keeps-slipping-experts-say-it-will-change-again/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/11/covid19-vaccine-timeline... "“Vaccine manufacturers hold their production capacity pretty close to their vest because it’s a point of a negotiation.” he said. Companies want to have flexibility in their contracts so they can balance production of various drugs and vaccines. “These companies are businesses and want to maximize their revenue. They’ll continue to make other products they can sell while manufacturing their vaccine.”" I know less than either Lowe or the State News author. I don't know where the particular bottlenecks might be. But it seems hard for me to believe that "ramping up is impossible" doesn't mean "ramping up is impossible under standard procedures, where we keep proprietary information proprietary, where we don't spend massively on capital equipment we might not need down the line (etc etc)" That is to say that we're far and far from a Manhattan Project intended to push vaccine manufacture to the logistical maximum. That's just how just any institutional process works.

BurningFrog 6y ago
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines to ever be mass produced, and they're needed for the biggest vaccination effort in human history. It seems very credible to me that ramping up from (guessing) thousands of doses to billions will take a long time. As I understand it, once the industry is set up, producing mRNA vaccines should be substantially faster than traditional techniques, since there is no biological step to wait for. They're "printed, not grown".
xyzzyz 6y ago
> “These companies are businesses and want to maximize their revenue. They’ll continue to make other products they can sell while manufacturing their vaccine There is an extremely easy solution to this problem, which is, just paying drug companies so much that it’s not worth for them to make anything else. Unfortunately, the governments around the world have failed the easiest cost-benefit analysis in the history, that is, trillions > billions, and so they negotiated the vaccine prices to be rather low, saving billions, while at the same time, spending trillions in stimulus money. Imagine if they just allowed the companies to sell the vaccines at the prices dictated by the market. Also imagine if they allowed AstraZeneca vaccine in the US without jumping through extra hoops, which cannot possibly give us more valuable information than we already have, now that millions of doses have already been administered in UK. Alas, the regulatory state has failed us in the pandemic the worst it has ever had.
- soared 6y ago
  Oof market value for a covid vaccine sounds like an absolutely brutal world to live in.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    Why? First doses go to highest bidders, which might as well be government, or it might wait a while until more doses are available and the bids get lower. The point here is to incentivize the vaccine manufacturers to race against one another, to produce as many doses as quickly as possible, in order to take advantage of the early high bidders. Instead, the current arrangement, where the governments claim first dibs on hundreds of millions of doses, while paying relative peanuts compared to the insane amounts of value those vaccines could produce, do very little to incentivize the companies to spare no expense to accelerate the production. Once they satisfy the obligations they have with governments, remaining buyers won't want to pay much either, so why bother?
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      In Seattle, the going price for a vaccine was $10,000, which of course created quite a scandal. But I bet if this were legal, the vaccine companies would find overnight ways to produce more vaccines. Instead, we have severe shortages. Shortages and gluts always happen when the government tries altruism instead of practicality.
      - philipkglass 6y ago
        Both manufacturers and legislators are going to be thinking about their future prospects as well as present prospects. In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it." I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.

BurningFrog 6y ago

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines to ever be mass produced, and they're needed for the biggest vaccination effort in human history. It seems very credible to me that ramping up from (guessing) thousands of doses to billions will take a long time. As I understand it, once the industry is set up, producing mRNA vaccines should be substantially faster than traditional techniques, since there is no biological step to wait for. They're "printed, not grown".

xyzzyz 6y ago

> “These companies are businesses and want to maximize their revenue. They’ll continue to make other products they can sell while manufacturing their vaccine There is an extremely easy solution to this problem, which is, just paying drug companies so much that it’s not worth for them to make anything else. Unfortunately, the governments around the world have failed the easiest cost-benefit analysis in the history, that is, trillions > billions, and so they negotiated the vaccine prices to be rather low, saving billions, while at the same time, spending trillions in stimulus money. Imagine if they just allowed the companies to sell the vaccines at the prices dictated by the market. Also imagine if they allowed AstraZeneca vaccine in the US without jumping through extra hoops, which cannot possibly give us more valuable information than we already have, now that millions of doses have already been administered in UK. Alas, the regulatory state has failed us in the pandemic the worst it has ever had.

soared 6y ago
Oof market value for a covid vaccine sounds like an absolutely brutal world to live in.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Why? First doses go to highest bidders, which might as well be government, or it might wait a while until more doses are available and the bids get lower. The point here is to incentivize the vaccine manufacturers to race against one another, to produce as many doses as quickly as possible, in order to take advantage of the early high bidders. Instead, the current arrangement, where the governments claim first dibs on hundreds of millions of doses, while paying relative peanuts compared to the insane amounts of value those vaccines could produce, do very little to incentivize the companies to spare no expense to accelerate the production. Once they satisfy the obligations they have with governments, remaining buyers won't want to pay much either, so why bother?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    In Seattle, the going price for a vaccine was $10,000, which of course created quite a scandal. But I bet if this were legal, the vaccine companies would find overnight ways to produce more vaccines. Instead, we have severe shortages. Shortages and gluts always happen when the government tries altruism instead of practicality.
    - philipkglass 6y ago
      Both manufacturers and legislators are going to be thinking about their future prospects as well as present prospects. In the counterfactual case of pure market driven vaccine pricing, a couple of election cycles from now there would likely be some politician rising on angry rhetoric against the approach. "Big Pharma made billions in windfall profits on human suffering -- let's claw back the money and vote out their government cronies who enabled it." I'd like to say that the electorate wouldn't fall for shallow bombast like that, but I can't. People got mad at Gilead for the pricing of their hepatitis C cure even though it had lower lifetime cost than the previous, far less effective state-of-the-art treatment.