3 ms·

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 ext

by 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.
    - feral 6y ago
      >If you're writing software Yes, 100% yes. Adding substantial resources can hugely speed up a project. I will requisition the very best engineers, the best support staff, remove all financial bottlenecks, dedicate shadowing teams to work in isolation in parallel on the critical sections, etc. > A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process. First off, if i recall correctly, and it's probably been 20 years since I read it, that mostly applies to late projects that have already gone off the rails. The broader point isn't true anyway. We're way better at writing software than we used to be. I've personally been on quite a few software projects where they became more strategic or promising than they initially seemed, and we threw more engineers at them to speed them up, and they sped up excellently.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      They're not writing software. Insofar as the vaccine is like software, they wrote the software in about a week. The problem is deploying the software. This is a mechanical problem. It involves setting up assembly lines. These lines consist of expensive medical equipment, highly skilled installation experts, and skilled operators. $100 billion could definitely buy or lease more equipment, get it installed, get it inspected, and pay more operators to operate the equipment. It could pay for for scientists and technicians working in related med-tech fields. It could pay their current employers to lend them from their current jobs, guaranteeing their positions upon return. The money could likewise supply any needed training, and if necessary, it could pay them extra money and extra vacation to compensate for the disruption in their lives from working third-shift, so that the machines run overnight. Money to the tune of billions and hiring lots of the best people is specifically what makes it so people don't have to "[work] themselves to the bone".
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Money and time. You can't make the assembly lines overnight, but enough money could make them in a few months. Just copy the designs for the machines they already have. There is probably opportunity to make more efficient machines as well, there almost always is, but that takes longer than a blind copy. Better in the long run, but takes longer to work out the bugs in the new design.
dependsontheq 6y ago
A tech comparison would be 4 or maybe 3 nm chips. Imagine everybody in the world would fork over 200B and order 7 billion chips this year... your constraint in that case is the manufacturing equipment and there are only so many experts in that area. The vaccine technologies we are using are scaled for the first time so you don’t have a big pool of experts or companies. The Chinese vaccine is probably the one best suited for scaling up and they are doing that rapidly.
epistasis 6y ago
It's a far more remarkable claim that $100B would improve production capacity, since that's a tiny tiny fraction of the costs of delay. But if you think that producers are intentionally holding back, and don't understand mRNA vaccine differences from adenovirus vaccines that have been used forever, this might help: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

by feral 6y ago

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.
  - feral 6y ago
    >If you're writing software Yes, 100% yes. Adding substantial resources can hugely speed up a project. I will requisition the very best engineers, the best support staff, remove all financial bottlenecks, dedicate shadowing teams to work in isolation in parallel on the critical sections, etc. > A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process. First off, if i recall correctly, and it's probably been 20 years since I read it, that mostly applies to late projects that have already gone off the rails. The broader point isn't true anyway. We're way better at writing software than we used to be. I've personally been on quite a few software projects where they became more strategic or promising than they initially seemed, and we threw more engineers at them to speed them up, and they sped up excellently.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    They're not writing software. Insofar as the vaccine is like software, they wrote the software in about a week. The problem is deploying the software. This is a mechanical problem. It involves setting up assembly lines. These lines consist of expensive medical equipment, highly skilled installation experts, and skilled operators. $100 billion could definitely buy or lease more equipment, get it installed, get it inspected, and pay more operators to operate the equipment. It could pay for for scientists and technicians working in related med-tech fields. It could pay their current employers to lend them from their current jobs, guaranteeing their positions upon return. The money could likewise supply any needed training, and if necessary, it could pay them extra money and extra vacation to compensate for the disruption in their lives from working third-shift, so that the machines run overnight. Money to the tune of billions and hiring lots of the best people is specifically what makes it so people don't have to "[work] themselves to the bone".
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Money and time. You can't make the assembly lines overnight, but enough money could make them in a few months. Just copy the designs for the machines they already have. There is probably opportunity to make more efficient machines as well, there almost always is, but that takes longer than a blind copy. Better in the long run, but takes longer to work out the bugs in the new design.

dependsontheq 6y ago

A tech comparison would be 4 or maybe 3 nm chips. Imagine everybody in the world would fork over 200B and order 7 billion chips this year... your constraint in that case is the manufacturing equipment and there are only so many experts in that area. The vaccine technologies we are using are scaled for the first time so you don’t have a big pool of experts or companies. The Chinese vaccine is probably the one best suited for scaling up and they are doing that rapidly.

epistasis 6y ago

It's a far more remarkable claim that $100B would improve production capacity, since that's a tiny tiny fraction of the costs of delay. But if you think that producers are intentionally holding back, and don't understand mRNA vaccine differences from adenovirus vaccines that have been used forever, this might help: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...