You are right that some vaccine patent-holding companies are selling at cost. I don’t know if that means that vaccine producers are manufacturing them at cost. Companies like Pfizer don’t necessarily do all their vaccine production in-house. They contract it out.
Operation Warp Speed planned 300 million doses by January 2021, but fell short. According to Airfinity data, 413 million doses have been produced worldwide as of the beginning of March. If these companies’ plans bear out, we’ll have 9 billion doses by year’s end. That looks like exponential growth (or probably sigmoidal) to me.
The key thing to remember here is that vaccine production is not the same as vaccination.
By the Crawford Standard, it’s not enough to find a piece of supporting evidence (i.e. vaccination rates) for a claim that the fundamental bottleneck for faster production (i.e. cost) has been identified. You have a hard job to do. You need to conclusively demonstrate that there are no other factors that might be major bottlenecks. Unless you’ve looked in detail at the economic and logistical challenges of building more factories and manufacturing more vaccines, you can’t rule that out as a major bottleneck.
I didn’t mean to suggest they were manufacturing at cost; quite the opposite! I was saying they weren’t going as fast as they possibly could, e.g. as fast as they would go if they were being paid $10K per vaccine −50% for each month of delay.
Thanks for the data point about doses manufactured so far; that does indeed look like they are ramping up production, though idk if it’s exponential, I’d want to see a graph. This is good evidence against my theory.
If production were exponential but administration were exponential-then-linear then there should be massive stockpiles of unused vaccines by now. Are there?
You are right that some vaccine patent-holding companies are selling at cost. I don’t know if that means that vaccine producers are manufacturing them at cost. Companies like Pfizer don’t necessarily do all their vaccine production in-house. They contract it out.
Operation Warp Speed planned 300 million doses by January 2021, but fell short. According to Airfinity data, 413 million doses have been produced worldwide as of the beginning of March. If these companies’ plans bear out, we’ll have 9 billion doses by year’s end. That looks like exponential growth (or probably sigmoidal) to me.
The key thing to remember here is that vaccine production is not the same as vaccination.
By the Crawford Standard, it’s not enough to find a piece of supporting evidence (i.e. vaccination rates) for a claim that the fundamental bottleneck for faster production (i.e. cost) has been identified. You have a hard job to do. You need to conclusively demonstrate that there are no other factors that might be major bottlenecks. Unless you’ve looked in detail at the economic and logistical challenges of building more factories and manufacturing more vaccines, you can’t rule that out as a major bottleneck.
I didn’t mean to suggest they were manufacturing at cost; quite the opposite! I was saying they weren’t going as fast as they possibly could, e.g. as fast as they would go if they were being paid $10K per vaccine −50% for each month of delay.
Thanks for the data point about doses manufactured so far; that does indeed look like they are ramping up production, though idk if it’s exponential, I’d want to see a graph. This is good evidence against my theory.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html is a graph of vaccine doses administered worldwide. It looks like in the beginning there was exponential growth and now there’s linear growth.
Right, but again, I’m talking in the OP about production, not administration.
If production were exponential but administration were exponential-then-linear then there should be massive stockpiles of unused vaccines by now. Are there?
Yes: https://www.axios.com/covid-astrazeneca-vaccine-us-doses-world-india-5a93ffad-dd9b-47a3-923a-9b62e6ed316d.html