“First, we need to consider planning and regulation failures prior to 2020. What failures of planning and regulation prevented us from setting up sufficient emergency vaccine production capacity before COVID-19 emerged? Could we have had a global network of pandemic vaccine factories on standby back in 2015?”
I am of the opinion that such failures are more than sufficient, given that there have been successful human trials for mRNA vaccines (for cancer immunotherapy, mostly, AFAICT as a layman) dating back to the early 2000s, and even more so to the early 2010s. The fact that designing the Moderna vaccine took two days and could be scaled up in a matter of months once it became clear that the vaccine would work and get used implies that all the critical technical and production problems already had known solutions. It would require a very large coincidence for there to have been very significant problems that just happened to get solved or become solvable within a few months of the first pandemic of this scale in generations.
But no, I don’t think there is a reasonable regulatory and planning framework that would have vaccine factories “on standby” in case of a pandemic. That would be very inefficient. Rather, I think a better regulatory and planning framework would have long since approved and scaled up at least a few and possibly many mRNA vaccines/other therapeutics, such that the factories that were already in use and operating profitably could be quickly repurposed or duplicated. This version of Earth would already have established protocols for testing and approving mRNA therapeutics, reducing the hand-wringing CYA antics of our regulatory agencies in the face of what outsiders saw as clear evidence of safety and efficacy. It would also have already built public trust and awareness of mRNA therapeutics, reducing hesitancy in much of the population.
Personally I really don’t care whether the world-as-it-was-in-January-2020 could have developed a vaccine more than a couple of months faster given better emergency regulatory changes or government funding or whatever. The correct solution to a pandemic is to have a better designed our regulatory infrastructure, and the innovation culture built around it, going back decades. We could have recognized that the FDA correctly declined to approve thalidomide in the 1960s instead of ignoring that and adding new hurdles for subsequent drugs. We could have learned from the AIDS crisis that it really doesn’t matter what group first suffers from a disease. We could have not thrown away the already-developed well-regarded pandemic playbook the US developed within the past decade.
“First, we need to consider planning and regulation failures prior to 2020. What failures of planning and regulation prevented us from setting up sufficient emergency vaccine production capacity before COVID-19 emerged? Could we have had a global network of pandemic vaccine factories on standby back in 2015?”
I am of the opinion that such failures are more than sufficient, given that there have been successful human trials for mRNA vaccines (for cancer immunotherapy, mostly, AFAICT as a layman) dating back to the early 2000s, and even more so to the early 2010s. The fact that designing the Moderna vaccine took two days and could be scaled up in a matter of months once it became clear that the vaccine would work and get used implies that all the critical technical and production problems already had known solutions. It would require a very large coincidence for there to have been very significant problems that just happened to get solved or become solvable within a few months of the first pandemic of this scale in generations.
But no, I don’t think there is a reasonable regulatory and planning framework that would have vaccine factories “on standby” in case of a pandemic. That would be very inefficient. Rather, I think a better regulatory and planning framework would have long since approved and scaled up at least a few and possibly many mRNA vaccines/other therapeutics, such that the factories that were already in use and operating profitably could be quickly repurposed or duplicated. This version of Earth would already have established protocols for testing and approving mRNA therapeutics, reducing the hand-wringing CYA antics of our regulatory agencies in the face of what outsiders saw as clear evidence of safety and efficacy. It would also have already built public trust and awareness of mRNA therapeutics, reducing hesitancy in much of the population.
Personally I really don’t care whether the world-as-it-was-in-January-2020 could have developed a vaccine more than a couple of months faster given better emergency regulatory changes or government funding or whatever. The correct solution to a pandemic is to have a better designed our regulatory infrastructure, and the innovation culture built around it, going back decades. We could have recognized that the FDA correctly declined to approve thalidomide in the 1960s instead of ignoring that and adding new hurdles for subsequent drugs. We could have learned from the AIDS crisis that it really doesn’t matter what group first suffers from a disease. We could have not thrown away the already-developed well-regarded pandemic playbook the US developed within the past decade.