Someone suggested to me recently that, against all appearances and expectations, the Trump Administration not buying enough mRNA vaccine for everyone right off the bat was actually the right call. We knew other vaccines were on the way which had way less exacting distribution conditions and/or were single-dose.
I suspect that proposition is Off in some important way, like the doses weren’t enough even to hold out for a switch out, and am curious what thoughts you all have about it.
It is off because if buying 100x what we need speeds up our vaccinations by one week we still got a fantastic deal, so you buy way way way too much of everything then donate or sell the rest to vaccinate the world be a hero and shut off or slow mutations and save lives.
We should have almost literally spared no expense.
It’s wrong because the first dose of the mRNA vaccine is approximately as good as the J&J vaccine. Give or take, “no evidence” blah blah blah. (what I am referring to is there is no gold standard RCT head to head comparing this exact scenario so we have ‘no evidence’ as to what will happen, we can only eyeball a graph and say, ‘well immunity seems to keep rising with the mRNA over time, and at 10 days it is about 50%, so it’s probably about 66% like the J&J vaccine at 30 days’. Similarly, we don’t actually know the J&J vaccine is any worse, there is “no evidence”, because it got tested with a different RCT, which means different people and possibly different strains of covid around. So there is a chance it has the same effectiveness as the mRNA vaccines but probably not)
Second, as you may have heard, the “exacting distribution conditions” were also overblown and it turns out a regular freezer is good enough, at least for a week, which is sufficient to distribute the doses.
Someone suggested to me recently that, against all appearances and expectations, the Trump Administration not buying enough mRNA vaccine for everyone right off the bat was actually the right call. We knew other vaccines were on the way which had way less exacting distribution conditions and/or were single-dose.
I suspect that proposition is Off in some important way, like the doses weren’t enough even to hold out for a switch out, and am curious what thoughts you all have about it.
It is off because if buying 100x what we need speeds up our vaccinations by one week we still got a fantastic deal, so you buy way way way too much of everything then donate or sell the rest to vaccinate the world be a hero and shut off or slow mutations and save lives.
We should have almost literally spared no expense.
It’s wrong because the first dose of the mRNA vaccine is approximately as good as the J&J vaccine. Give or take, “no evidence” blah blah blah. (what I am referring to is there is no gold standard RCT head to head comparing this exact scenario so we have ‘no evidence’ as to what will happen, we can only eyeball a graph and say, ‘well immunity seems to keep rising with the mRNA over time, and at 10 days it is about 50%, so it’s probably about 66% like the J&J vaccine at 30 days’. Similarly, we don’t actually know the J&J vaccine is any worse, there is “no evidence”, because it got tested with a different RCT, which means different people and possibly different strains of covid around. So there is a chance it has the same effectiveness as the mRNA vaccines but probably not)
Second, as you may have heard, the “exacting distribution conditions” were also overblown and it turns out a regular freezer is good enough, at least for a week, which is sufficient to distribute the doses.