What is this “we” you are talking about? Vaccines aren’t cotton masks, where anyone with $200 of equipment and materials can make a dozen of them. Especially the mRNA version, which requires different equipment than the annual flu vaccine.
Plus, there were X different vaccines being pursued as of March 2020. 6 of them have now been approved (in various countries worldwide), but how many didn’t work out. The process of scaling from lab bench to factory is difficult and expensive, and that couldn’t even start until it is know which ones are going to work. (Or if someone was willing to spend the $$$ to develop every candidate in parallel. I don’t know how much that would have cost, but it didn’t happen.)
and that couldn’t even start until it is know which ones are going to work.
First of all, we totally could have started whilst still uncertain about which ones were going to work. The cost of starting and then stopping the ramp-up is probably at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of actually producing a billion doses. Given the stakes involved, the rational thing for humanity to do would be to ramp up multiple vaccines in parallel, so that at least one would be ready to go when it is proven safe.
Secondly, we didn’t need 10 months to know which ones were going to work. The FDA approval process is not the fastest way of determining whether a vaccine is sufficiently safe to be worth producing during a pandemic.
There were some government funded and philanthropic (gates I think) backstops, essentially guarantees of paying for losses if manufacturing before knowing if it worked turned out bad. There should have been more and faster, as pointed out by Cowen.
I remember reading around the beginning of the pandemic that Bill Gates was going to do exactly that: subsidize production of many different vaccine candidates with his own money, and accept the sunk cost for any vaccines that ended up not working. I haven’t seen anything about this idea recently though, and it seems he has not been (at least publicly) behind any vaccine production efforts. Any idea why? To avoid perceived competition with Operation Warp Speed?
What is this “we” you are talking about? Vaccines aren’t cotton masks, where anyone with $200 of equipment and materials can make a dozen of them. Especially the mRNA version, which requires different equipment than the annual flu vaccine.
Plus, there were X different vaccines being pursued as of March 2020. 6 of them have now been approved (in various countries worldwide), but how many didn’t work out. The process of scaling from lab bench to factory is difficult and expensive, and that couldn’t even start until it is know which ones are going to work. (Or if someone was willing to spend the $$$ to develop every candidate in parallel. I don’t know how much that would have cost, but it didn’t happen.)
We = humanity. Or the USA, if you prefer.
First of all, we totally could have started whilst still uncertain about which ones were going to work. The cost of starting and then stopping the ramp-up is probably at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of actually producing a billion doses. Given the stakes involved, the rational thing for humanity to do would be to ramp up multiple vaccines in parallel, so that at least one would be ready to go when it is proven safe.
Secondly, we didn’t need 10 months to know which ones were going to work. The FDA approval process is not the fastest way of determining whether a vaccine is sufficiently safe to be worth producing during a pandemic.
There were some government funded and philanthropic (gates I think) backstops, essentially guarantees of paying for losses if manufacturing before knowing if it worked turned out bad. There should have been more and faster, as pointed out by Cowen.
I remember reading around the beginning of the pandemic that Bill Gates was going to do exactly that: subsidize production of many different vaccine candidates with his own money, and accept the sunk cost for any vaccines that ended up not working. I haven’t seen anything about this idea recently though, and it seems he has not been (at least publicly) behind any vaccine production efforts. Any idea why? To avoid perceived competition with Operation Warp Speed?