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Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the articles I’ve read (including this one) say that Pfizer had to invest $2B to develop this vaccine.

However this article says they bought seven $200M machines to manufacture lipid nanoparticles. This implies to me that $1.4B of $2B Pfizer is supposed to have spent on development was actually just updating their supply chain for mRNA based vaccines.

While I’m happy that they made such a dramatic investment in the interests of bringing a product to market as fast as possible I think it’s also fair to imply it’s R&D that can’t be applied to other products later.

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The very promising crispr anti-cancer trial recently also used lipid nanoparticles. Seems it's a useful tech for delivering stuff into cells.

> have spent on development was actually just updating their supply chain

Warp Speed funding to AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson also included money that was earmarked for manufacturing capability investment.

Are you sure the amounts overlap?

Overlapping doesn't matter - large multinationals' decisions over spending are more likely to look like: "if we receive $X from the government to spend on Y, then we'll have a spare $X to spend on Z"

If the development spending happened prior to negotiating the manufacturing deals it matters (they had been working on mRNA vaccines for other viruses). The decision to spend the money on the development wasn't necessarily made with knowledge of the government purchase guarantee.

I think it is fair to say that they invested $2B, if it were a dead end there was a chance that the machines would not be that useful, or at least they would incur a large loss on paying a premium for them at the time.

Conversely it shouldn't be frowned upon that they invested and believed in BioNTech's methods that made it trivial to almost immediately produce a vaccine candidate on an unproven platform.

Moderna likewise had their vaccine candidate within days of having the sequence, vaccines are mostly pretty easy when your first try works!

Pfizer is BioNTech's manufacturing partner and did logistics for clinical trials, they didn't do the R&D. There are other international licensees of the same vaccine, e.g. Fosun in China.

And I suppose they spent a handy sum on marketing to pull off this being known as the "Pfizer vaccine" in domestic media despite this. Note the article headline is "How Pfizer Delivered ..." not "Developed".

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