5 ms·

Sure it’s private companies but it wasn’t random chance that led to AstraZeneca (a British–Swedish company) working with the Oxford group in the U.K. or Pfizer

Sure it’s private companies but it wasn’t random chance that led to AstraZeneca (a British–Swedish company) working with the Oxford group in the U.K. or Pfizer (an American company) with BioNTech. It’s a lot easier to control production when it happens within your borders (eg Trump did have some executive order banning exports but this was just symbolic when the defence production act was invoked.)

jimbob45 6y ago
BioNTech is German and Pfizer is American. Am I missing something?
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Pfizer has big factories in the US for making vaccines. How many does BioNTech have in Germany?
  - csnweb 6y ago
    They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-produktion-deutschland-338.html https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.
  - sitic 6y ago
    The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine#Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.
      - vkou 6y ago
        Two reasons. 1. Planners are penny-wise, and pound foolish. 2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        I meant legitimate reasons. If those are the only reasons I'll be expecting significant jail time to be handed out.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Those are legitimate reasons. Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic. Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case. They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now. I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time. To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.
  - nirv 6y ago
    BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty). Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boost-covid-19-vaccine-production-11615640401?mod=hp_lead_pos2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boo... [2] https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-test-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-in-china-and-scores-50m-investment/ https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-te... [3] https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic-partnership-with-biontech-on-covid-19-vaccine-152784.html https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic... [4] https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partnership-04-02-2021.html https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partne...
einarvollset 6y ago
Trump never invoked the Defense Production Act.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  But Biden did, right?
  - einarvollset 6y ago
    Yep
  - bogomipz 6y ago
    They both did. Trump did it for medical supplies a year earlier: https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-defense-production-act https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-...
- optimiz3 6y ago
  > President Trump first invoked the DPA in late March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic...limiting the export of medical goods, increasing domestic production of masks and ventilators https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-defense-production-act https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-... Nothing in there on vaccine export but one would assume it is implied.
  - einarvollset 6y ago
    It is not I don't think, but I could be wrong.
- blhack 6y ago
  Yes he did: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/politics/trump-defense-production-act-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/politics/trump-defense-produc...
  - 6y ago

jimbob45 6y ago

BioNTech is German and Pfizer is American. Am I missing something?

dan-robertson 6y ago
Pfizer has big factories in the US for making vaccines. How many does BioNTech have in Germany?
- csnweb 6y ago
  They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-produktion-deutschland-338.html https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.
- sitic 6y ago
  The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine#Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Two reasons. 1. Planners are penny-wise, and pound foolish. 2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        I meant legitimate reasons. If those are the only reasons I'll be expecting significant jail time to be handed out.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Those are legitimate reasons. Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic. Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case. They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now. I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time. To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.
- nirv 6y ago
  BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty). Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boost-covid-19-vaccine-production-11615640401?mod=hp_lead_pos2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boo... [2] https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-test-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-in-china-and-scores-50m-investment/ https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-te... [3] https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic-partnership-with-biontech-on-covid-19-vaccine-152784.html https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic... [4] https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partnership-04-02-2021.html https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partne...

einarvollset 6y ago

Trump never invoked the Defense Production Act.

dan-robertson 6y ago
But Biden did, right?
- einarvollset 6y ago
  Yep
- bogomipz 6y ago
  They both did. Trump did it for medical supplies a year earlier: https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-defense-production-act https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-...
optimiz3 6y ago
> President Trump first invoked the DPA in late March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic...limiting the export of medical goods, increasing domestic production of masks and ventilators https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-defense-production-act https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-... Nothing in there on vaccine export but one would assume it is implied.
- einarvollset 6y ago
  It is not I don't think, but I could be wrong.
blhack 6y ago
Yes he did: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/politics/trump-defense-production-act-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/politics/trump-defense-produc...
- 6y ago