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We did "waste" billions of dollars on a number of possible vaccine candidates that didn't actually pan out. See, Merck and Sanofi and GSK. Primate models are

We did "waste" billions of dollars on a number of possible vaccine candidates that didn't actually pan out. See, Merck and Sanofi and GSK. Primate models are great (best we have), but we didn't "know" these things worked until end of December. It's beginning of Feb. I know the world is on fire, but things are moving fairly quickly. 1.34 million vaccinations a day in the U.S., from zero at beginning of Dec. That's pretty good. With much luck, the plateau in the vaccination rate this week gets resolved and we manage to hit 2M/day by end of Feb.

pas 6y ago
Economists clearly articulated last year that governments should buy capacity, not doses directly. Because that just pushes prices up (and we see the conflicts about fulfilling orders). Furthermore. Since the process of vaccine development and manufacturing is closed, done in the shadows, no one had any idea where the bottleneck will be. (Yes, some companies bet on their vaccine and started expansion while the development was ongoing. And Derek speculates that the supply chain is at full capacity, but ... we don't know, and again, we could have been expanding that too exactly since a year ago.) The mRNA LPN packaging might be new, but manufacturing plasmids that churn out Adeno Associated Virus particles with the correct payload is so old tech random youtube dude did it in 2018 February. https://m.youtube.com/watch/J3FcbFqSoQY https://m.youtube.com/watch/J3FcbFqSoQY
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  And yet, JnJ and Gamaleya both seem to be having difficulties producing at scale.
  - pas 6y ago
    It's not surprising. Nobody coughed up the funds. For example Trump simply went with ordering only 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and said meh when asked about whether maybe in a country of 300+ million people they might happen to ... need a few extra ones. The EU negotiated so hard that even though it ordered 400M from AstraZeneca, somehow they find it more important to fulfill other orders first. It's too little too late. I understand that Bill Gates [0] can be so blasé easily, as for him it's just more of the same. Plus he has predicted it, he was directly trying to do something against these global health problems for at least a decade now. But this "inefficiency" - that thousands of people die of each day - is mind boggingly infuriating. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI

pas 6y ago

Economists clearly articulated last year that governments should buy capacity, not doses directly. Because that just pushes prices up (and we see the conflicts about fulfilling orders). Furthermore. Since the process of vaccine development and manufacturing is closed, done in the shadows, no one had any idea where the bottleneck will be. (Yes, some companies bet on their vaccine and started expansion while the development was ongoing. And Derek speculates that the supply chain is at full capacity, but ... we don't know, and again, we could have been expanding that too exactly since a year ago.) The mRNA LPN packaging might be new, but manufacturing plasmids that churn out Adeno Associated Virus particles with the correct payload is so old tech random youtube dude did it in 2018 February. https://m.youtube.com/watch/J3FcbFqSoQY https://m.youtube.com/watch/J3FcbFqSoQY

hcknwscommenter 6y ago
And yet, JnJ and Gamaleya both seem to be having difficulties producing at scale.
- pas 6y ago
  It's not surprising. Nobody coughed up the funds. For example Trump simply went with ordering only 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and said meh when asked about whether maybe in a country of 300+ million people they might happen to ... need a few extra ones. The EU negotiated so hard that even though it ordered 400M from AstraZeneca, somehow they find it more important to fulfill other orders first. It's too little too late. I understand that Bill Gates [0] can be so blasé easily, as for him it's just more of the same. Plus he has predicted it, he was directly trying to do something against these global health problems for at least a decade now. But this "inefficiency" - that thousands of people die of each day - is mind boggingly infuriating. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI