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Economists clearly articulated last year that governments should buy capacity, not doses directly. Because that just pushes prices up (and we see the conflicts
by 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 agoAnd yet, JnJ and Gamaleya both seem to be having difficulties producing at scale.
- pas 6y agoIt'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