11 ms·

I wonder if they, like Pfizer, will take the opportunity to declare that they have shipped 2x as many doses retroactively (in Pfizer’s case it was an extra dose

I wonder if they, like Pfizer, will take the opportunity to declare that they have shipped 2x as many doses retroactively (in Pfizer’s case it was an extra dose in every vial).

xiphias2 6y ago
Hundreds of millions of people would pay 5x the current price to get the vaccine faster. I feel like the policy of governments getting a monopoly on vaccine distribution is stopping companies in competing for speed of vaccine production and building more factories.
- atonse 6y ago
  Yeah but for that reason I’m very thankful that the government DOES have a monopoly on this process. That’ll ensure the vaccine goes to the people that need it the most first, not just the people that can be gouged the most.
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    Edited to add: I'm not sure what's controversial about this? What did I mess up here? People seem to disagree but aren't, as of about an hour after I replied, saying why. In a way, we're seeing this happen at the national/country scale already. Countries that can afford it ("that can be gouged the most") are buying hundreds of millions of doses and the systems that are supposed to be getting doses to countries that can't afford it appear to be going wanting. That's the problem with health care as a capitalistic market. There's no upper bound on what someone would want to pay to preserve either their life or the life of someone they care about. The only limit is on the resources that person has access to, and people will make some screamingly bad long-term decisions in order to satisfy that short-term need for cash. If we did as the grandparent proposed and opened something like a bidding market for vaccines, you'd absolutely have GoFundMe and whatever the digital equivalent of yard sales are for people who are desperate to get the vaccine but don't have the money. Hell, I already see "please venmo me some cash so I can shelter-in-place away from my relative who has COVID because I can't afford to catch it myself as I'm the only person who makes money for my household."
- gens 6y ago
  Your words anger me.
- ch4s3 6y ago
  I would normally argue this case, but "factories" is sort of hand-wavy here. The factories dumping out the feedstock are all producing enough to meet a higher level of production. The mixing step is the bottle neck, and is a really hard, expensive process to scale up. Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two, and companies don't want to drastically over shoot building out expensive single purpose tooling.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two Aren't many scientific advisors saying that 1) it will take years to vaccinate the developing world, and 2) risk groups may need annual booster shots in perpetuity to deal with mutations?
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      Potentially but that's not definite. No company will risk profits to invest in an unknown short term demand. They're fine letting people languish so they can ensure maximum profit.
      - tomp 6y ago
        You’re simplifying this thing beyond reasonable. Several counterpoints: (1) “profit” is just another way of saying “effort”. Would you try and work hard and risk your own money if you knew you weren’t getting paid for it? If you say “yes”, do you actually do that? (2) they’re probably used to it in this industry, but these pharma companies are really getting more hate than praise these days. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Except that they’re not actually damned if they don’t, they wouldn’t be in the news at all! (3) same argument as above, except r/pharma/West. People here developed an amazing technological post-industrial civilisation over centuries, and now we can use this technology to rapidly produce vaccines... yet we’re getting all the hate for not producing, manufacturing, distributing it fast enough. A bit unfair, don’t you think?
        6y ago
- GhostOT 6y ago
  Is there any evidence that paying 5x the price would actually result in a faster rollout of the vaccine? At a certain scale and timeline you can't throw money at the problem anymore there's a finite limit to how fast our global infrastructure can operate.
  - pc86 6y ago
    The only thing it would result in is a faster rollout of the vaccine to low-risk individuals with money to spend. Distribution is currently [/supposedly] roughly correlated to risk and public exposure in the early phases. High-risk people with money would just have to spend money they otherwise wouldn't. So this type of plan would come at the expense of high-risk people without money. This proposal is literally about putting high-risk people at greater risk - and by extension, killing them - so low-risk people with money can feel a little better about eating at a restaurant and drinking at a bar on a Friday night.
    - tomp 6y ago
      Do you feel the same way about Tesla? ”These selfish rich people just wanna feel better about themselves driving their EV vehicles that noone else can afford!” Yet the end result is, that more people can now afford EVs than otherwise could. I know it’s a bit different with Covid vaccines (AFAIK they were largely sponsored by governments), but the underlying principle of your argument is just wrong - it’s good that rich investors sponsor new technology (even for selfish reasons!) because that makes technology available to everyone, sooner!
      - jowsie 6y ago
        I think comparing driving a Tesla when plenty of other cheaper forms of transport exist, with a vaccine to a currently ongoing pandemic that is literally killing people and to which there is no other available vaccine option, is a tad on the ridiculous side.
      - pc86 6y ago
        It's almost as if luxury vehicles and life-saving vaccines are different, and should be treated differently.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Free market ignores need and just exploits want. Regulation ensures those in need receive it. Scarcity ensures demand, supply erodes price. The ability for companies to charge what they want for the vaccine would ensure only those that could afford it would receive it, and there wouldn't be additional capital investment because that would dilute profits.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Regulations price lives of old people at about $500 right now (vaccine price / death rate). The only government that didn't try to get the cheapest price for the vaccine is Israel, and we see the impressive results already.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      This is true, but also misleading. There would not be more vaccines made if every country were overbidding, Israel is just moving ahead in the queue. It can do this because it is rich and is really tiny. The Israel strategy would only work for a few select countries in the world.
  - throwaway9980 6y ago
    Needs are wants with greater urgency. Demand is ensured by the ongoing widespread death associated with the virus. Government should stand ready to pay a large price to ensure supply and provide subsidy for those with less means. Regulation, in this case, introduces inefficiency. Inefficiency, in this case, costs lives.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      > Needs are wants with greater urgency. You don't always want needs. Want is desire. Need is requirement. People are notorious for trying to satisfy their needs with desires and left feeling unfulfilled.
      - throwaway9980 6y ago
- gambiting 6y ago
  5 times 0 is still zero. Also I hate everything your comment represents. From top to bottom. Nothing against yourself personally of course.
- newacct583 6y ago
  There's absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Money can't buy things instantly, the vaccine ramp is progressing very well as it is, and if you want to claim that a giant check would somehow produce more shots in arms you need to make that case with data. There are only so many units of the nanolipid production equipment available, and only so many factories that can make more, and only so many engineers who know how to operate those factories.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    A gaint check could make a difference in the rate six months from now. Though with other vaccines in development that use different processes it is questionable if those would be shots in the arm vs shots made and discarded because we don't need them. Your guess is as good as mine as to which vaccines will work.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      > A gaint check could make a difference in the rate six months from now. Six months from now, assuming no further ramp in vaccine production (which seems extremely conservative given that it reflects only Pfizer and Moderna production), the US will have fully vaccinated almost 60% of the population, which is likely close to a herd immunity threshold. Increased production beyond that would be wasted money, as the pandemic will be controlled.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        There is the rest of the world. Your point still stands though.
- Caligatio 6y ago
  Please do not bring the American healthcare mentality to a product that is needed by literally everyone. The minute people can spend 5x to get the vaccine means that people will need to spend 5x to get the vaccine.
- ornornor 6y ago
  I don’t want to live in your world.
- epistasis 6y ago
  No, that's preposterous, paying 5x more won't increase production capacity any more. There's already massive incentive to ship first, since there are competing vaccines. If an additional $10B-$100B could result in additional production of mRNA vaccine, it would have been delivered by governments if not by investors. This is simply a new tech with new techniques. Throwing extra money at a problem when there isn't a chance of increasing production capacity only causes inflation of prices, and rentierism. There is no benefit.
  - feral 6y ago
    It's a huge claim to say that $100B extra couldn't have resulted in a speed up. What makes you so sure of that? What's the manufacturing bottleneck that an extra $100B up front couldn't parallelize? I just have trouble believing that without some evidence?
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      For mRNA vaccines, this is the first time they've ever been produced at all, and it's for the biggest vaccination campaign in history. So I can see how that can't go much faster. For regular tech vaccines, you're probably right.
      - feral 6y ago
        OK, but conversely there were literally no mRNA vaccines mass produced a year ago, and now they are delivering hundreds of millions of doses this year - so they've clearly being able to scale production quite quickly. Its a big claim to say another $100B wouldn't have scaled it faster. I'm sure they still have bottlenecks, and financial risks they weren't willing to take. $100B is a lot of resources - but a justified amount given the economic costs, which is the point.
        epistasis 6y ago
        If you're writing software, and want the project to be completed faster, does throwing another $100B at a project make it go faster? Usually, this will slow it down, not make it go faster. A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process. This is a similar sort of process. There's extremely specialized knowledge held by only a tiny number of people, and though there is a plan to vastly expand production, it's never been done before. The bottleneck is not money, the bottleneck is people. People who have undoubtedly been working themselves to the bone to get this done as quickly as possible.
- tchalla 6y ago
  And some of other hundreds of millions won’t be able to pay for vaccine. Are you sure you want to decide on health outcomes based on income / wealth?
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    I mean, gestures at health outcomes in America, we do that today.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    The cost is in ramping up production, actually after it is ramped up, it's generally cheaper to produce an additional vaccine (Wright's law). With the current pace people in most countries need to wear masks for years to come.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  If this were purely a logistics problem then I would sort of agree with this, at least in the sense of being an avenue worth trying - but as far as I can tell the current problems with the vaccine are mainly in the nitty-gritty details of actually making it in the first place. Right now the companies doing that can basically write their price.
- tzs 6y ago
  In the case of mRNA vaccines, according to what I've read the limiting factor is that they depend on specialized precursors that very few companies can make. Before the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine all mRNA vaccines that had been developed for humans didn't make it past testing. There was no need to have the ability to make them beyond what was needed for research and testing. And if one of the prior human mRNA vaccines had looked good in the middle of the phase III trial, the low manufacturing capacity would not have mattered. A normal phase III trial takes years, and the diseases the vaccines were for were not pandemics. So even if it takes a couple years to get up to the needed capacity, that would be fast enough. With COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, we've got (1) an emergency use authorization rather than a normal approval, so a much shorter time between finding out that the thing works and the start of consumer distribution, and (2) it's a pandemic so the number of doses needed is very very high. That's the worst possible combination.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I read that the precursor was using an animal and there is a way to make it artificially (which was not approved by the FDA so far). I just wish governments were focusing on helping in ramping up manufacturing instead of using the current crisis for stealing as much money as possible (which is happening in my country).
    - mlyle 6y ago
      The critical path is microfluidics and machines to make lipid nanoparticles. It's likely these paths are ramping as quickly as possible. There's no use of intact animals to make these vaccines. I don't think there are any use of animal cell cultures in any of the mainline vaccine paths (though there are some human cell lines used in the adenovirus, etc, vaccines that many people consider problematic).
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        I imagine they are referring to endotoxin testing. (and then horseshoe crabs and recombinant factor C) The FDA should figure out if fFC works and then mandate use of it if it works.
- WallWextra 6y ago
  There aren't many people with the expertise to produce the vaccine, and they're all already working on the existing production lines. The lead times are just inherently long here; takes months to start up a production line.
newacct583 6y ago
You seem to imply that that's somehow a trick or a bad thing, but the only valid purpose to counting number of vaccines shipped[1] is as a proxy for the number of vaccines delivered. The extra doses in a vial were a happy accident, not a trick. And the number we actually want to know is the one we're being given now.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  If a vaccine vial was shipped in December and was given wholly to one person, that’s one dose. You can’t claim it was two back then because it couldn’t have been used as two. The real problem I see is that we count vaccine doses as one shot. For Pfizer and Moderna two shots = one dose. It is misleading to show a two vial dose as two doses.
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    the vials hold 5 shots and then they were approved to hold 6 shots. this was good because the packaging of the vaccine was one factor in slowing down the spread of the vaccines.
    - IgorPartola 6y ago
      But you can’t count that retroactively for vials where 5 shots were administered and at that point the vial was empty. You can only count that for unopened vials.
      - skybrian 6y ago
        Right, but this is a dispute over something they didn't do.
      - DanBC 6y ago
        You can count 6 shots if 6 shots were given. That's what's happening.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
raverbashing 6y ago
Not retroactively since it would need the ok from the regulator (and then start dispensing the half doses) I think Pfizer could only start counting the 6th doses after the agencies Ok'd it (and the special syringes were procured)
Slartie 6y ago
Do you have any source or proof regarding that "retroactively" claim? Because AFAIK they only started to bill customers for 6 doses per vial when they received official regulatory approval for the 6th dose. Vials delivered earlier were not affected, so any 6th dose gathered from them was effectively free.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  You are correct, it was not applied retroactively: > Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA, clarified that the change is not going to be applied retroactively, meaning that all vials previously shipped out are counted as containing five doses. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/pfizer-board-member-gottlieb-defends-move-to-ship-fewer-covid-vaccine-vials.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/pfizer-board-member-gottlieb...
  - colineartheta 6y ago
    Can you edit your original comment to reflect this? It is false and misleading.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      No, unfortunately, it is past the point where I can edit it. Feel free to flag it - I’m not sure how else to moderate the comment at this point.
      - colineartheta 6y ago
        Very understandable, thank you.

I wonder if they, like Pfizer, will take the opportunity to declare that they have shipped 2x as many doses retroactively (in Pfizer’s case it was an extra dose in every vial).

xiphias2 6y ago

Hundreds of millions of people would pay 5x the current price to get the vaccine faster. I feel like the policy of governments getting a monopoly on vaccine distribution is stopping companies in competing for speed of vaccine production and building more factories.

atonse 6y ago
Yeah but for that reason I’m very thankful that the government DOES have a monopoly on this process. That’ll ensure the vaccine goes to the people that need it the most first, not just the people that can be gouged the most.
- techsupporter 6y ago
  Edited to add: I'm not sure what's controversial about this? What did I mess up here? People seem to disagree but aren't, as of about an hour after I replied, saying why. In a way, we're seeing this happen at the national/country scale already. Countries that can afford it ("that can be gouged the most") are buying hundreds of millions of doses and the systems that are supposed to be getting doses to countries that can't afford it appear to be going wanting. That's the problem with health care as a capitalistic market. There's no upper bound on what someone would want to pay to preserve either their life or the life of someone they care about. The only limit is on the resources that person has access to, and people will make some screamingly bad long-term decisions in order to satisfy that short-term need for cash. If we did as the grandparent proposed and opened something like a bidding market for vaccines, you'd absolutely have GoFundMe and whatever the digital equivalent of yard sales are for people who are desperate to get the vaccine but don't have the money. Hell, I already see "please venmo me some cash so I can shelter-in-place away from my relative who has COVID because I can't afford to catch it myself as I'm the only person who makes money for my household."
gens 6y ago
Your words anger me.
ch4s3 6y ago
I would normally argue this case, but "factories" is sort of hand-wavy here. The factories dumping out the feedstock are all producing enough to meet a higher level of production. The mixing step is the bottle neck, and is a really hard, expensive process to scale up. Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two, and companies don't want to drastically over shoot building out expensive single purpose tooling.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two Aren't many scientific advisors saying that 1) it will take years to vaccinate the developing world, and 2) risk groups may need annual booster shots in perpetuity to deal with mutations?
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    Potentially but that's not definite. No company will risk profits to invest in an unknown short term demand. They're fine letting people languish so they can ensure maximum profit.
    - tomp 6y ago
      You’re simplifying this thing beyond reasonable. Several counterpoints: (1) “profit” is just another way of saying “effort”. Would you try and work hard and risk your own money if you knew you weren’t getting paid for it? If you say “yes”, do you actually do that? (2) they’re probably used to it in this industry, but these pharma companies are really getting more hate than praise these days. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Except that they’re not actually damned if they don’t, they wouldn’t be in the news at all! (3) same argument as above, except r/pharma/West. People here developed an amazing technological post-industrial civilisation over centuries, and now we can use this technology to rapidly produce vaccines... yet we’re getting all the hate for not producing, manufacturing, distributing it fast enough. A bit unfair, don’t you think?
      - 6y ago
GhostOT 6y ago
Is there any evidence that paying 5x the price would actually result in a faster rollout of the vaccine? At a certain scale and timeline you can't throw money at the problem anymore there's a finite limit to how fast our global infrastructure can operate.
- pc86 6y ago
  The only thing it would result in is a faster rollout of the vaccine to low-risk individuals with money to spend. Distribution is currently [/supposedly] roughly correlated to risk and public exposure in the early phases. High-risk people with money would just have to spend money they otherwise wouldn't. So this type of plan would come at the expense of high-risk people without money. This proposal is literally about putting high-risk people at greater risk - and by extension, killing them - so low-risk people with money can feel a little better about eating at a restaurant and drinking at a bar on a Friday night.
  - tomp 6y ago
    Do you feel the same way about Tesla? ”These selfish rich people just wanna feel better about themselves driving their EV vehicles that noone else can afford!” Yet the end result is, that more people can now afford EVs than otherwise could. I know it’s a bit different with Covid vaccines (AFAIK they were largely sponsored by governments), but the underlying principle of your argument is just wrong - it’s good that rich investors sponsor new technology (even for selfish reasons!) because that makes technology available to everyone, sooner!
    - jowsie 6y ago
      I think comparing driving a Tesla when plenty of other cheaper forms of transport exist, with a vaccine to a currently ongoing pandemic that is literally killing people and to which there is no other available vaccine option, is a tad on the ridiculous side.
    - pc86 6y ago
      It's almost as if luxury vehicles and life-saving vaccines are different, and should be treated differently.
cptskippy 6y ago
Free market ignores need and just exploits want. Regulation ensures those in need receive it. Scarcity ensures demand, supply erodes price. The ability for companies to charge what they want for the vaccine would ensure only those that could afford it would receive it, and there wouldn't be additional capital investment because that would dilute profits.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Regulations price lives of old people at about $500 right now (vaccine price / death rate). The only government that didn't try to get the cheapest price for the vaccine is Israel, and we see the impressive results already.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    This is true, but also misleading. There would not be more vaccines made if every country were overbidding, Israel is just moving ahead in the queue. It can do this because it is rich and is really tiny. The Israel strategy would only work for a few select countries in the world.
- throwaway9980 6y ago
  Needs are wants with greater urgency. Demand is ensured by the ongoing widespread death associated with the virus. Government should stand ready to pay a large price to ensure supply and provide subsidy for those with less means. Regulation, in this case, introduces inefficiency. Inefficiency, in this case, costs lives.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    > Needs are wants with greater urgency. You don't always want needs. Want is desire. Need is requirement. People are notorious for trying to satisfy their needs with desires and left feeling unfulfilled.
    - throwaway9980 6y ago
gambiting 6y ago
5 times 0 is still zero. Also I hate everything your comment represents. From top to bottom. Nothing against yourself personally of course.
newacct583 6y ago
There's absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Money can't buy things instantly, the vaccine ramp is progressing very well as it is, and if you want to claim that a giant check would somehow produce more shots in arms you need to make that case with data. There are only so many units of the nanolipid production equipment available, and only so many factories that can make more, and only so many engineers who know how to operate those factories.
- bluGill 6y ago
  A gaint check could make a difference in the rate six months from now. Though with other vaccines in development that use different processes it is questionable if those would be shots in the arm vs shots made and discarded because we don't need them. Your guess is as good as mine as to which vaccines will work.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > A gaint check could make a difference in the rate six months from now. Six months from now, assuming no further ramp in vaccine production (which seems extremely conservative given that it reflects only Pfizer and Moderna production), the US will have fully vaccinated almost 60% of the population, which is likely close to a herd immunity threshold. Increased production beyond that would be wasted money, as the pandemic will be controlled.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      There is the rest of the world. Your point still stands though.
Caligatio 6y ago
Please do not bring the American healthcare mentality to a product that is needed by literally everyone. The minute people can spend 5x to get the vaccine means that people will need to spend 5x to get the vaccine.
ornornor 6y ago
I don’t want to live in your world.
epistasis 6y ago
No, that's preposterous, paying 5x more won't increase production capacity any more. There's already massive incentive to ship first, since there are competing vaccines. If an additional $10B-$100B could result in additional production of mRNA vaccine, it would have been delivered by governments if not by investors. This is simply a new tech with new techniques. Throwing extra money at a problem when there isn't a chance of increasing production capacity only causes inflation of prices, and rentierism. There is no benefit.
- feral 6y ago
  It's a huge claim to say that $100B extra couldn't have resulted in a speed up. What makes you so sure of that? What's the manufacturing bottleneck that an extra $100B up front couldn't parallelize? I just have trouble believing that without some evidence?
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    For mRNA vaccines, this is the first time they've ever been produced at all, and it's for the biggest vaccination campaign in history. So I can see how that can't go much faster. For regular tech vaccines, you're probably right.
    - feral 6y ago
      OK, but conversely there were literally no mRNA vaccines mass produced a year ago, and now they are delivering hundreds of millions of doses this year - so they've clearly being able to scale production quite quickly. Its a big claim to say another $100B wouldn't have scaled it faster. I'm sure they still have bottlenecks, and financial risks they weren't willing to take. $100B is a lot of resources - but a justified amount given the economic costs, which is the point.
      - epistasis 6y ago
        If you're writing software, and want the project to be completed faster, does throwing another $100B at a project make it go faster? Usually, this will slow it down, not make it go faster. A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process. This is a similar sort of process. There's extremely specialized knowledge held by only a tiny number of people, and though there is a plan to vastly expand production, it's never been done before. The bottleneck is not money, the bottleneck is people. People who have undoubtedly been working themselves to the bone to get this done as quickly as possible.
tchalla 6y ago
And some of other hundreds of millions won’t be able to pay for vaccine. Are you sure you want to decide on health outcomes based on income / wealth?
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  I mean, gestures at health outcomes in America, we do that today.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  The cost is in ramping up production, actually after it is ramped up, it's generally cheaper to produce an additional vaccine (Wright's law). With the current pace people in most countries need to wear masks for years to come.
mhh__ 6y ago
If this were purely a logistics problem then I would sort of agree with this, at least in the sense of being an avenue worth trying - but as far as I can tell the current problems with the vaccine are mainly in the nitty-gritty details of actually making it in the first place. Right now the companies doing that can basically write their price.
tzs 6y ago
In the case of mRNA vaccines, according to what I've read the limiting factor is that they depend on specialized precursors that very few companies can make. Before the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine all mRNA vaccines that had been developed for humans didn't make it past testing. There was no need to have the ability to make them beyond what was needed for research and testing. And if one of the prior human mRNA vaccines had looked good in the middle of the phase III trial, the low manufacturing capacity would not have mattered. A normal phase III trial takes years, and the diseases the vaccines were for were not pandemics. So even if it takes a couple years to get up to the needed capacity, that would be fast enough. With COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, we've got (1) an emergency use authorization rather than a normal approval, so a much shorter time between finding out that the thing works and the start of consumer distribution, and (2) it's a pandemic so the number of doses needed is very very high. That's the worst possible combination.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I read that the precursor was using an animal and there is a way to make it artificially (which was not approved by the FDA so far). I just wish governments were focusing on helping in ramping up manufacturing instead of using the current crisis for stealing as much money as possible (which is happening in my country).
  - mlyle 6y ago
    The critical path is microfluidics and machines to make lipid nanoparticles. It's likely these paths are ramping as quickly as possible. There's no use of intact animals to make these vaccines. I don't think there are any use of animal cell cultures in any of the mainline vaccine paths (though there are some human cell lines used in the adenovirus, etc, vaccines that many people consider problematic).
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      I imagine they are referring to endotoxin testing. (and then horseshoe crabs and recombinant factor C) The FDA should figure out if fFC works and then mandate use of it if it works.
WallWextra 6y ago
There aren't many people with the expertise to produce the vaccine, and they're all already working on the existing production lines. The lead times are just inherently long here; takes months to start up a production line.

newacct583 6y ago

You seem to imply that that's somehow a trick or a bad thing, but the only valid purpose to counting number of vaccines shipped[1] is as a proxy for the number of vaccines delivered. The extra doses in a vial were a happy accident, not a trick. And the number we actually want to know is the one we're being given now.

IgorPartola 6y ago
If a vaccine vial was shipped in December and was given wholly to one person, that’s one dose. You can’t claim it was two back then because it couldn’t have been used as two. The real problem I see is that we count vaccine doses as one shot. For Pfizer and Moderna two shots = one dose. It is misleading to show a two vial dose as two doses.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  the vials hold 5 shots and then they were approved to hold 6 shots. this was good because the packaging of the vaccine was one factor in slowing down the spread of the vaccines.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    But you can’t count that retroactively for vials where 5 shots were administered and at that point the vial was empty. You can only count that for unopened vials.
    - skybrian 6y ago
      Right, but this is a dispute over something they didn't do.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      You can count 6 shots if 6 shots were given. That's what's happening.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago

raverbashing 6y ago

Not retroactively since it would need the ok from the regulator (and then start dispensing the half doses) I think Pfizer could only start counting the 6th doses after the agencies Ok'd it (and the special syringes were procured)

Slartie 6y ago

Do you have any source or proof regarding that "retroactively" claim? Because AFAIK they only started to bill customers for 6 doses per vial when they received official regulatory approval for the 6th dose. Vials delivered earlier were not affected, so any 6th dose gathered from them was effectively free.

faitswulff 6y ago
You are correct, it was not applied retroactively: > Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA, clarified that the change is not going to be applied retroactively, meaning that all vials previously shipped out are counted as containing five doses. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/pfizer-board-member-gottlieb-defends-move-to-ship-fewer-covid-vaccine-vials.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/pfizer-board-member-gottlieb...
- colineartheta 6y ago
  Can you edit your original comment to reflect this? It is false and misleading.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    No, unfortunately, it is past the point where I can edit it. Feel free to flag it - I’m not sure how else to moderate the comment at this point.
    - colineartheta 6y ago
      Very understandable, thank you.