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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

> We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines

Are we sure "we" didn't? I don't know the actual numbers behind what was spent ahead of time for the various vaccines, but I believe the manufacturing process was ramped up before the trials completed.

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There was discussion of it early on, but there's no evidence that it was done on any significant scale outside of the efforts of individual pharma companies working on their own supply chains.

It's possible that I'm wrong! Maybe we invested everything possible and couldn't have done significantly more. But it's striking that this article doesn't even address that question.

Basically, I haven't seen any evidence that this take is wrong: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/covid-bill-gates-and...

Oh thanks I was looking for followup on the Gates thing, that blog post is superb. And depressing.

I am not entirely sure I agree with the thinking though.

While initial production ramp up would get the richer countries vaccinated quickly it seems like Gates has a more holistic picture and wants to see the whole world vaccinated faster.

I agree with this thinking. It won't matter if rich countries are vaccinated if other countries are coming up with new variations all the time. We want to eradicate this by having everyone in the world on the same page, not have it hanging around like the flu.

The economists that put together this working paper estimated that we left a lot on the table. Several months and hundreds of billions of dollars in the US (that invested a relatively large amount) and nearly a year and over a trillion dollars for the globe. Table 1 on page 6 summarizes it.

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BFI_WP_2...

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