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After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufactur

by jonway 5y ago

After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufacturing. OWS supplied capital for hardware, people, project management, brokered manufacturing agreements and organized large scale trials. Article mentions that moderna had a big weakness: Inexperienced at executing clinical trials and large scale manufacturing of its vaccine technology, it could produce a prototype vaccine in several days but had no existing pipeline to deliver industrial quantities. >It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. The vaccines were out in a couple of months. Amazingly, it turns out that the hard part is scaling to global quantities of a new product line. Re-engineering a global production is way hard, too. I agree that we should continue to fund the scaleout of domestic biomedical manufacturing.

jimmygrapes 5y ago
> After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufacturing. OWS supplied capital for hardware, people, project management, brokered manufacturing agreements and organized large scale trials. > Article mentions that moderna had a big weakness: Inexperienced at executing clinical trials and large scale manufacturing of its vaccine technology, it could produce a prototype vaccine in several days but had no existing pipeline to deliver industrial quantities. > >It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. > The vaccines were out in a couple of months. Amazingly, it turns out that the hard part is scaling to global quantities of a new product line. Re-engineering a global production is way hard, too. > I agree that we should continue to fund the scaleout of domestic biomedical manufacturing. I think OWS highlighted what could be done if incentives were aligned, and the only things that stopped it from being an inarguable success were 1) the same thing that made it a success (speed and comms to get shit done), which caused a lot of people to say "hey that's weird the government never does anything right when they move fast" based on most of their lived understanding and experience; and, 2) the utter failure of honesty from the institutions most needed to be honest. If the CDC etc. had remained publicly politically unbiased throughout Trump's admin, they would not have been so distrusted, I think. If the Biden admin (and Democrats in general) had not campaigned almost entirely as anti-everything-Trump and instead recognized the few good things done, the polarized Republicans (and listless independents/others) might not have had such a visceral negative reaction. All it would have taken to prevent a large majority of "vaccine hesitation" would be to have had Biden and Trump on stage together saying "Hey we might disagree on a lot but we need to work together on this." Maybe one or both parties refused to do this or maybe they didn't think to, I don't know. But I do know, deep down inside, it would have helped. Now, though? Way too late.

by jonway 5y ago

jimmygrapes 5y ago

> After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufacturing. OWS supplied capital for hardware, people, project management, brokered manufacturing agreements and organized large scale trials. > Article mentions that moderna had a big weakness: Inexperienced at executing clinical trials and large scale manufacturing of its vaccine technology, it could produce a prototype vaccine in several days but had no existing pipeline to deliver industrial quantities. > >It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. > The vaccines were out in a couple of months. Amazingly, it turns out that the hard part is scaling to global quantities of a new product line. Re-engineering a global production is way hard, too. > I agree that we should continue to fund the scaleout of domestic biomedical manufacturing. I think OWS highlighted what could be done if incentives were aligned, and the only things that stopped it from being an inarguable success were 1) the same thing that made it a success (speed and comms to get shit done), which caused a lot of people to say "hey that's weird the government never does anything right when they move fast" based on most of their lived understanding and experience; and, 2) the utter failure of honesty from the institutions most needed to be honest. If the CDC etc. had remained publicly politically unbiased throughout Trump's admin, they would not have been so distrusted, I think. If the Biden admin (and Democrats in general) had not campaigned almost entirely as anti-everything-Trump and instead recognized the few good things done, the polarized Republicans (and listless independents/others) might not have had such a visceral negative reaction. All it would have taken to prevent a large majority of "vaccine hesitation" would be to have had Biden and Trump on stage together saying "Hey we might disagree on a lot but we need to work together on this." Maybe one or both parties refused to do this or maybe they didn't think to, I don't know. But I do know, deep down inside, it would have helped. Now, though? Way too late.