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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

Derek is a smart guy but here again we see the utter lack of the ability to think big in the drug community. It would have been worth it to spend a trillion dollars and speculatively build out capacity and manufacturing for every vaccine candidate. We should have built megafactories and employed a million people.

And we should have done large-scale phase 3 trials by randomizing distribution of large fractions of the output of these megafactories.

It's just completely wrong to say that everything was done as well as it could possibly have been and there's no way it could have been faster. There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

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> we see the utter lack of the ability to think big in the drug community

I don't know what you are talking about. Speculatively building out capacity for as yet unproven vaccines was suggested and planned back from the beginning already.

(Here for example the Gates foundation in April 2020: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-diffe... )

> There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

The Economist calculated, based on a Goldman Sachs study, that "an American wearing a mask for a day is helping prevent a fall in gdp of $56.14. Not bad for something that you can buy for about 50 cents apiece." - so, basically a 10000% ROI in a day!

Yes, then, money could have been sensibly employed, but on what? Maybe it would have been better employed on PR to persuade people to wear masks, or maybe a DDOS shutting down social media. How to allocate money optimally in real time remains a difficult question.

I don't think things could have been substantially faster, though things could have been much less painful if not for the intransigence and recklessness of many covidiots.

EDIT to add the source: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/08/22/w...

and outline if paywalled: https://outline.com/yCeVzn

Some people talked about it, but IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

Then the problem wasn’t “thinking big” though, but execution, follow through, red tape, I don’t know what.

There are problems that cannot be solved by simply throwing money at them. Sure, invest billions in new manufacturing capacity. That capacity probably wouldn't been ready now, ramping manufacturing is hard enough, starting from scratch even harder.

This whole vaccine availability "scandal" is driving me nuts. It was clear that nobody knew which vaccine would work. It was prudent to buy all of the potential candidates.

It was also clear that there would be a ramp up phase, in each country and for each vaccine. The EU pretty much delivered on part one, sourcing. And I don't care what the press writes, 5 doses for each EU citizen regardless of age is enough.

EU member states screwed up on managing part two. And communication. I think, things will tun smoother once we have a vaccine that can be handled and used by every doctors practice. That supply chain works for millions of vaccinations every year. Before that, it is hit and miss.

I don't see any realistic way to expand manufacturing capacities at that kind of scale in such a short time. There are a lot of things that are potential bottlenecks because the stuff you need isn't produced at that scale and there aren't unlimited numbers of people that have the right experience. And with producing a vaccine it is extremely important that the production results in exactly what you intend to produce, to ensure it is safe and effective. That part is done by designing processes, carefully checking that they work and then strictly adhering to them. That is not an activity that is easy to scale up.

By now the scale could be far larger than it is currently. Moving up vaccine timetables by just a few months would be enormously valuable. I never said it was easy, but the answer was not "let's do nothing because it's hard."

You are speaking from hindsight. Just a few months ago the smart money was on the mRNA vaccines not completing phase-3 before some of the more conventional vaccines that we already have the ability to produce in large quantities.

That mRNA completed phase-3 trials first was a big shock to everyone. That they are significantly better than the conventional vaccines is also a big shock. If we knew about these shocks 1 year ago we would have invested a lot more money in mRNA (and none at all in all the other vaccines - some failed trails, some are in progress, and the rest are are not as good) and had more manufacturing as a result.

we certainly knew there was a potential for this "shock"

Yeah, but it was a long shot potential. If it hadn't worked out you would be mad at the government for allocating money to this stupid bet instead of something else (probably J&J which wouldn't have come out any sooner)

From what I understood, despite all of other advantages, they still need bigger, and more frequent doses.

This is narrow-minded thinking influenced by recent events instead of a realistic risk assessment. Imagine you spend trillions on vaccines for possibly deadly diseases, and then the Yellowstone supervolcano breaks out and general disaster control is in a bad shape because you've spent trillions elsewhere.

You can prepare for everything but it needs to be done on the basis of balancing many different concerns.

Why should we imagine highly contrived scenario, most risks are known, we underinvest in prevention and then pay 10x when shit hits the fan

> There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

Maybe!

But, while the transmission rate appears to be sort of high - the fatality rate seems to be low (and getting lower as we figure out effective treatment protocols). I guess I personally don't think it was worth killing the economy over it.. Isolate "at risk people" (say over 75-or-so?) In fact, at least in the US - I think the shutdown caused more harm than the disease (although reasonable people often draw different conclusions from the same data...)

The market clearly decided that investing a trillion dollars in speculative capacity was not valuable. Absent Federal intervention (in the US at least), where would the money come from? Had the Trump Administration utilized the Defense Production Act to nationalize the necessary resources, then perhaps we would have had the necessary capacity by now, but it decided to go with "Warp Speed" instead.

Obviously this would not happen with purely private investment.

Even if Trump had done that, he would have invested in the wrong vaccines. This is NOT incompetence, nobody had any reason to think mRNA would be the way to go 9+ months ago when the money was allocated.

The point wasn't that mRNA was the way to go, the point was that the only reasonable way to prepare to mass produce any vaccines, mRNA or "traditional" formats, was for a government to either nationalize development of the production systems, or fork over billions of dollars to have the production lines ready for whatever vaccine was developed.

Instead, the administration sat on its hands and said "what could we possibly do?" and the mess we have today (in the US at least) is the direct result.

> The market clearly decided that investing a trillion dollars in speculative capacity was not valuable

Somehow the investors need to get back their investment, cover their risk, and make a profit on top of that. Impossible?

Even worldwide, the median per-capita household income is $2,920. 1 trillion is a lot of money.

Edit: is there a name for the fallacy “something costs an individual $x, therefore the individual can afford to pay $x”, or the similar fallacy “something costs people an $x GDP, therefore the government should pay $x to fix it”.

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