There’s no such thing as a general vaccine factory. It also might very well take years to get a new vaccine factory build in Ghana where there’s little existing talent and infrastructure. You generally build factories in locations that actually lend itself to effective production.
Maybe. Building takes time, but we had 3 months there between “oh shit” in March (when siting, decision making, and planning could start) and “ok, these vaccines look promising” in June, and another 6 months before they were getting approved. Which is plenty of time to physically ship building materials and production equipment, train local people to use it, and start manufacturing.
Note: I picked Ghana because that’s the name that came to mind, but 5 minutes of reading wikipedia indicates that it’s actually not a bad choice to site a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. In fact, Gates (or whoever) wouldn’t even need to pay the majority of the costs—just paying the salary of 2-3 experts / coordinators and greasing the wheels to get the deals made, and the Ghana government could pick up the construction & staffing costs (and, thereby, reap the benefits)
There’s no such thing as a general vaccine factory.
Out of curiosity, how true is that if we limit ourselves to mRNA vaccines (AKA what seemed to be the leading possibility from May-June onward)? The production processes for mRNA molecules themselves are quite general, and mixing the salts, acids, sugars, and stabilizers shouldn’t require unusual equipment. As I understand it the lipid production is more specialized, but it seems likely that the same or similar lipids would be needed for a wide spectrum of mRNA vaccines?
The production processes for mRNA molecules themselves are quite general, and mixing the salts, acids, sugars, and stabilizers shouldn’t require unusual equipment.
Mixing the mRNA molecules with the lipids needs specialized equipment. Derek Lowe writes in Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing:
My own guess as to what such a Vaccine Machine involves is a large number of very small reaction chambers, running in parallel, that have equally small and very precisely controlled flows of the mRNA and the various lipid components heading into them. You will have to control the flow rates, the concentrations, the temperature, and who knows what else, and you can be sure that the channel sizes and the size and shape of the mixing chambers are critical as well.
There’s no such thing as a general vaccine factory. It also might very well take years to get a new vaccine factory build in Ghana where there’s little existing talent and infrastructure. You generally build factories in locations that actually lend itself to effective production.
Maybe. Building takes time, but we had 3 months there between “oh shit” in March (when siting, decision making, and planning could start) and “ok, these vaccines look promising” in June, and another 6 months before they were getting approved. Which is plenty of time to physically ship building materials and production equipment, train local people to use it, and start manufacturing.
Note: I picked Ghana because that’s the name that came to mind, but 5 minutes of reading wikipedia indicates that it’s actually not a bad choice to site a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. In fact, Gates (or whoever) wouldn’t even need to pay the majority of the costs—just paying the salary of 2-3 experts / coordinators and greasing the wheels to get the deals made, and the Ghana government could pick up the construction & staffing costs (and, thereby, reap the benefits)
Out of curiosity, how true is that if we limit ourselves to mRNA vaccines (AKA what seemed to be the leading possibility from May-June onward)? The production processes for mRNA molecules themselves are quite general, and mixing the salts, acids, sugars, and stabilizers shouldn’t require unusual equipment. As I understand it the lipid production is more specialized, but it seems likely that the same or similar lipids would be needed for a wide spectrum of mRNA vaccines?
Mixing the mRNA molecules with the lipids needs specialized equipment. Derek Lowe writes in Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing: