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The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production. And while the US is wealthy, it’s not wealthier than all of the other countries

The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production. And while the US is wealthy, it’s not wealthier than all of the other countries combined, and yet it is donating more vaccine than all other countries combined.

maxerickson 5y ago
The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production. This is what I disagree with. They picked relatively low targets and invested against those. Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. And it's production rate that is the bottleneck, not the decision to donate or whatever.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. Citation needed. Scaling an industry from nothing in a year is a herculean task. I’m a staunch Trump critic, but Operation Warp Speed worked pretty well (if only because DJT got out of the way). The production rates are damn impressive and it’s not like anyone had any idea about how much vaccine we would be able to produce or how quickly. Arguments from hindsight aren’t particularly convincing.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The spending they did do was probably illegal (glad they did it). They took ~$10 billion from other programs. Why didn't Congress allocate $50 billion? The piece the New York Times did on production of the Pfizer vaccine makes it pretty clear that a lot of the production is not new (bioreactors and the like). I realize it isn't trivial to do that sort of production, and don't really disagree with "Arguments from hindsight aren't particularly convincing.", but I also haven't seen a single piece of information on what fundamental limit was run into. The mixing of the mRNA and lipids got a lot of attention, but there wasn't any clear 'here's why we can't go twice as fast' information published, as far as I saw.

maxerickson 5y ago

The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production. This is what I disagree with. They picked relatively low targets and invested against those. Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. And it's production rate that is the bottleneck, not the decision to donate or whatever.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. Citation needed. Scaling an industry from nothing in a year is a herculean task. I’m a staunch Trump critic, but Operation Warp Speed worked pretty well (if only because DJT got out of the way). The production rates are damn impressive and it’s not like anyone had any idea about how much vaccine we would be able to produce or how quickly. Arguments from hindsight aren’t particularly convincing.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The spending they did do was probably illegal (glad they did it). They took ~$10 billion from other programs. Why didn't Congress allocate $50 billion? The piece the New York Times did on production of the Pfizer vaccine makes it pretty clear that a lot of the production is not new (bioreactors and the like). I realize it isn't trivial to do that sort of production, and don't really disagree with "Arguments from hindsight aren't particularly convincing.", but I also haven't seen a single piece of information on what fundamental limit was run into. The mixing of the mRNA and lipids got a lot of attention, but there wasn't any clear 'here's why we can't go twice as fast' information published, as far as I saw.