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Yes, actually, you can. (A well-endowed manufacturer can produce this equipment.) But it takes coordination, leadership, unlimited funding, and federal authorit
by Robotbeat 6y ago
Yes, actually, you can. (A well-endowed manufacturer can produce this equipment.) But it takes coordination, leadership, unlimited funding, and federal authority to step across red tape and corporate veils and IP to get things done. I was involved with some of this stuff. I know first hand how uncoordinated and un-led much of it was. We needed technocrats on private jets flying around the country tooling up production and solving every supply chain bottleneck like they were Elon trying to squeeze out luxury car production at the end of a quarter.
And vaccine production ABSOLUTELY could've been parallelized with approval. In fact, it was. They were stockpiling doses before approval. But the effort was at least an order of magnitude smaller than it ought to have been.
We constantly make excuses for this lack of effort. We shouldn't. We know what is possible. We can read history books.
- visarga 6y agoI'm wondering how we'd fared if Elon was in charge.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThat's a tough one. Could go either way (he's unstable... but resourceful). Tesla has been helping CureVac, though, which is one of the other mRNA vaccine providers (and could perhaps help scale out Moderna and Pfizer's vaccine, if they were given access to all their IP?).
- JamesBarney 6y agoI don't think we could have done worse.
- Robotbeat 6y agoEurope is somehow vaccinating fewer people as a percent of the population than the US.
- Slartie 6y agoThis is true, and it will stay that way for a while. The US (at federal level) failed at nearly everything regarding containment of the virus, but got one single thing right in this pandemic: ordering vaccines. Ordering enough from the most promising manufacturers, at high-enough prices, and early. The EU failed at all of these three things in the most historic way possible.