The technology is pretty standard. I can't imagine that there's any tech-driven bottleneck to development, but rather, issues surrounding licensing, IP transfer

The technology is pretty standard. I can't imagine that there's any tech-driven bottleneck to development, but rather, issues surrounding licensing, IP transfer, liability, etc (in other words: legal concerns). Once those are resolved, there's still a fixed amount of time that it takes to convert existing production facilities to some new purpose that you can't really eliminate (the old saying about 9 women having a baby in 1 month applies here...) Basically, it's the sort of thing HN readers don't like to hear: the complexities of the real world create obstacles that are difficult to surmount with technology alone. If I had to guess, even if you got approval to have N partners manufacture the vaccine today, it would still take a few months to ramp those partners up to capacity.