I think there are significant differences in manufacturing and transportation. My understanding is that cowpox was common enough that vaccines for smallpox were made somewhat locally, and there was no constraint about how many doses could be available. For COVID-19 vaccines, the necessity of distant manufacturing and limited doses added a LOT of politics in who gets it first. And this political truth led to massive restriction in how it’s delivered.
There are two parts to the 50x difference—number of doses available to doctors/nurses, and percentage of those doses actually injected (vs still in storage or stuck in the supply chain). From what I can tell, many big cities have injected ~25% of the doses they have received. I don’t know how this compares to smallpox, as JIT manufacturing could be modeled as delivering 100% of available doses, or less than 1%.
edit: not local or JIT manufacturing, it seems. But still no supply limits. I find it easy to believe that the limited supply of vaccine is driving all of the slowness, both directly and indirectly. Directly because we don’t have enough, and indirectly because the fact that some people have to wait adds the politics and perception problems of “fairness” and “optimization” that hugely slows things down.
I think there are significant differences in manufacturing and transportation. My understanding is that cowpox was common enough that vaccines for smallpox were made somewhat locally, and there was no constraint about how many doses could be available. For COVID-19 vaccines, the necessity of distant manufacturing and limited doses added a LOT of politics in who gets it first. And this political truth led to massive restriction in how it’s delivered.
There are two parts to the 50x difference—number of doses available to doctors/nurses, and percentage of those doses actually injected (vs still in storage or stuck in the supply chain). From what I can tell, many big cities have injected ~25% of the doses they have received. I don’t know how this compares to smallpox, as JIT manufacturing could be modeled as delivering 100% of available doses, or less than 1%.
edit: not local or JIT manufacturing, it seems. But still no supply limits. I find it easy to believe that the limited supply of vaccine is driving all of the slowness, both directly and indirectly. Directly because we don’t have enough, and indirectly because the fact that some people have to wait adds the politics and perception problems of “fairness” and “optimization” that hugely slows things down.