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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I would normally argue this case, but "factories" is sort of hand-wavy here. The factories dumping out the feedstock are all producing enough to meet a higher level of production. The mixing step is the bottle neck, and is a really hard, expensive process to scale up. Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two, and companies don't want to drastically over shoot building out expensive single purpose tooling.

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> Demand for the vaccine is likely to dry up in a year or two

Aren't many scientific advisors saying that 1) it will take years to vaccinate the developing world, and 2) risk groups may need annual booster shots in perpetuity to deal with mutations?

Potentially but that's not definite. No company will risk profits to invest in an unknown short term demand. They're fine letting people languish so they can ensure maximum profit.

You’re simplifying this thing beyond reasonable.

Several counterpoints:

(1) “profit” is just another way of saying “effort”. Would you try and work hard and risk your own money if you knew you weren’t getting paid for it? If you say “yes”, do you actually do that?

(2) they’re probably used to it in this industry, but these pharma companies are really getting more hate than praise these days. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Except that they’re not actually damned if they don’t, they wouldn’t be in the news at all!

(3) same argument as above, except r/pharma/West. People here developed an amazing technological post-industrial civilisation over centuries, and now we can use this technology to rapidly produce vaccines... yet we’re getting all the hate for not producing, manufacturing, distributing it fast enough.

A bit unfair, don’t you think?

Profit is not equivalent to effort, that's naive. Profit occurs as much from inaction as it does action.

Profit is exploitation of needs or wants, which isn't necessarily evil. Evil is having the power to stop suffering easily without harming yourself but choosing to seek profits instead (e.g. insulin prices).

Just as we have regulations (e.g. patents) to protect business's profitability, we should have equal regulations to protect the public need.

And that's why we have the Defense Production Act. Don't give them a choice.

Well yes, but you still don't want to overbuild capacity.

This may be true, but isn't vaccine fundamentally a delivery mechanism for a custom mRNA strand?

If you build up the infrastructure you could quickly deliver a vaccine for another disease or practically any genetic therapy that could be delivered the same way. Moderna also has an advantage in that the logistics required are simpler.

The mixing step ins't transferable. I'm not super familiar with micro fluid mixing, but it happens on specially created glass plates with channels as narrow as a molecule wide. They's essentially single purpose physical process microchips. Constructing them is a (maybe the) bottle neck. Apparently you can count on both hands the number of people who know how to build these things.

Interesting. Are these channels related to length (in bases) of certain components?

What is the basis for saying the vaccine were developed "in a day" if this crucial, specific step was required?

Are there good sources with details on those steps and microfluidic chips?

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