Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing | Hacker News Reader

Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing

blogs.sciencemag.org

17 pointsnabla96 comments

Is there anything those of us in other industries (software, 3D printing) can do to increase production capacity of those special purpose bespoke machines?

(With an understanding that the best answer might just be "stay out of the way"...)

Microfluidics is a fantastic area of research that more people should get involved in. My impression is that it's very difficult to make it work and expensive to scale up, but that means there's plenty of room for improvement and business models to be created. Too late to help with our current pandemic though.

The article doesn’t explain why you can’t throw a lot of money at licensing out and expanding the production of lipid nanoparticle machines that it identifies as a bottleneck.

I mostly agree. He touches on it, but it's based on assumption and entirely superficial:

"That doesn’t mean that you can’t build more of the machines, but I would assume that Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna (and CureVac as well) have largely taken up the production capacity for that sort of expansion as well."

The obvious question, then, is whether that production capacity could be increased, and whether we have a problem of throughput (which added resources might parallelize) or latency (and we will have all the devices we want, N months from now).

I disagree with the post inside the article because it is logically flawed. The current approved crop did not have capacity to produce those vaccines either. MRNA did not have the facilities. It is mostly subcontracted. The reason that others are not producing any vaccine, is due to fact that they don't have it approved yet. There many contractors but not all countries have them.

The lesson in all this is for each country to produce their own vaccines and create facilities within their own countries and avoid being in mercy of superpowers' self interests and punish companies that ignored them during times of great need.

Beside being long yet void of any convincing arguments/ideas, this article completely ignores the fact that the majority of Covid vaccines are not mRNA vaccines, thus invalidating the premise that "we don't have enough vaccines because mRNA vaccines are hard to produce".

A more appropriate title would be "let me show off what I know about mRNA vaccines".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com