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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

No, that's preposterous, paying 5x more won't increase production capacity any more.

There's already massive incentive to ship first, since there are competing vaccines. If an additional $10B-$100B could result in additional production of mRNA vaccine, it would have been delivered by governments if not by investors.

This is simply a new tech with new techniques. Throwing extra money at a problem when there isn't a chance of increasing production capacity only causes inflation of prices, and rentierism. There is no benefit.

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> If an additional $10B-$100B could result in additional production of mRNA vaccine, it would have been delivered by governments if not by investors.

No. No. No.

Not only is there no guarantee that it would have been delivered by governments, there is a major counterexample affecting hundreds of millions of people: the European Union.

The EU tasked a specific body, the European Commission, to negotiate vaccine purchases for the entire bloc at once. The commission approached vaccine negotiations like a trade deal, because they usually negotiate trade deals, and ended up extracting terms that would have been good for a trade deal. They refused to go easy on the manufacturers, and thus "saved" themselves many billions — billions that they would have been much better off sacrificing (to make the negotiations faster, instead of taking months) or outright spending (to speed up production).

https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/02/03/how-europe-dodge...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europe-tripped-in-covid-19-...

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-s...

Now they are tripping over themselves in an attempt to salvage the mess they made, issuing ill-considered threats to seize production that has been pledged abroad, rather than trying to speed things up.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/01/vaccine-...

Please note that the EU is the _only_ Western country that is currently exporting vaccines to the world. It is the US + UK that are blocking all exports. Even Canada gets its vaccines from the EU, since the US is not sending them any.

So yes, clearly the EU has made mistakes (fully agree with the 1st part of your post), but they had good intentions and it is not as bad as you make it sound.

> It is the US + UK that are blocking all exports

No. The UK government publishes a list of medicines blocked for export[1] and the vaccine isn’t on the list. The EU is solely to blame for being at the back of the queue and are the only state I know of to threaten blocking exports.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Not much difference between using 100% of the locally produced doses locally and blocking it for export. Let's rephrase the question: which countries are the US and UK currently exporting vaccine to and in which quantities?

Every country they promised to, which is the core of the matter.

It's one thing to be upfront from the start about how you're going to independently produce vaccine for yourself first, ensuring nobody plans on receiving your production.

It's another entirely to promise to export and then later threaten to hold back.

Ok, and what is the list of those countries and the quantities that they're getting?

Because from your second sentence it read like an awfully short list if nobody's expecting on receiving vaccine.

> It's one thing to be upfront from the start about how you're going to independently produce vaccine for yourself first

It's not even that, it's being up front about paying all the local manufacturers to make vaccines for you first.

AZ was/is shipping vaccine from the EU to the UK. That's what the EU considered stopping.

The EU's local manufacturers were supplying non-locally because they had a contract to do that and the EU hadn't set up such a contract, or a contract at all. Usually, if you've not got a contract then you don't get a say, and usually, if other people set up a contract first, they get supplied first, which is why the EU tried to use other means, and because that jeopardises the most fundamental part of all trade - contracts - everyone condemned them. Quite rightly.

Perhaps you were referring to something else?

There’s a huge difference.

If you buy up all a local farmer’s apples for your cider business that is not protectionism. If you arrange for him to effectively become your sole supplier during your busy period that is not protectionism. It’s free trade, that well known opposite.

Hard enough to defend the EU’s protectionism and disorganisation when it’s just food, didn’t think I’d see anyone lining up to do it over vaccines.

That's literally apples and vaccines. In the future you might as well not bother with such pointless digressions.

Back on topic: recently read on CNN that the UK contract's exactly the same as the EU one (best effort) and it was signed later than the EU one even if it was negotiated earlier.

If we combine that with the fact that the UK is not exporting any vaccine and the EU is, including to the UK, it seems to me that the EU was right to be upset with AZ and put pressure on them.

The UK is being selfish and trying to make the EU look like the bad guy.

If you're unwilling to be civil and also unwilling to engage in the argument presented to you - even when made clear via analogy - then I'm not sure why you think anyone will bother to listen to you.

> it seems to me that

You've busted that flush.

The UK is currently not exporting vaccines and there are no countries which are receiving vaccines from the UK.

This is what OP claimed and there is only one argument that can be made against that: a list of countries where the UK or the US is exporting vaccines. By now it should be clear to anyone reading this far that you can't provide that.

> This is what OP claimed

No, this is what the OP claimed:

> It is the US + UK that are blocking all exports

As to this:

> there is only one argument that can be made against that

Again - no, there are other arguments against that, the best being that black and white thinking is a terrible way to analyse reality, the second best being that a list was provided above of medicines blocked for export by the UK and no SARS-COV-2 vaccines are on it.

If the logic evades you further it may help to ask a question: which vaccines are you exporting and is it because you are blocking exports?

That should make it clear that there are more possible reasons for exports not to happen than their being intentionally blocked.

Human beings are able to move past the narrow meaning of specific words and look at the bigger picture, which is that vaccines are neither leaving the UK, nor reaching other countries.

This is the measure that will be used to judge the UK. Whether the vaccine is on some list may be an aggravating factor, but it's otherwise immaterial.

> Human beings are able to move past the narrow meaning of specific words

How convenient. Considering you claimed one thing that was false and are now claiming another thing that is also false but would help make your original claim true because you say so, I think I'll stick with the "narrow" form of interpretation that humans have managed so well with up till now.

> This is the measure that will be used to judge the UK.

Only by those with such strong prejudices that it requires a reimagining of the English language and of logic to help protect them from having to re-examine their notions.

> Whether the vaccine is on some list may be an aggravating factor, but it's otherwise immaterial.

Unless you have evidence of the vaccine being blocked then it is material indeed, however inconvenient that is for you. Feel free to supply actual evidence of the vaccine being blocked that goes beyond "because I say so" and doesn't require pushing words beyond their actual meaning.

Vaccines are neither leaving the UK, nor reaching other countries.

I’m also not going to or leaving the UK and there’s no blocking going on.

Have you noticed the lack of logical necessity in your argument yet?

Yes, and if someone were to wait for you and need you outside the UK you would not be there for them. Just like the vaccine.

Because of prior arrangements, not because of blocking.

I'm glad that you now acknowledge that "there is only one argument" is not so, that is definitely progress.

I've been trying to say for quite a while now that it doesn't matter why something/someone is not present where they should be, if the consequence is people will die. How hard can it be to understand that? :)

Those people are still dead.

I agree that they shouldn't have tried to squeeze the last cent out of it, while the pandemic is costing much more.

But would it really have changed things if they didn't?

There wouldn't magically have been more factory capacity and it's not like the UK/US would allow for a substantial part of their capacity to be exported.

Then there was also the unfortunate failure of the Sanofi vaccin and the late arrival of the Jannsen vaccin which was just really bad luck for the EU.

It's a huge claim to say that $100B extra couldn't have resulted in a speed up.

What makes you so sure of that? What's the manufacturing bottleneck that an extra $100B up front couldn't parallelize?

I just have trouble believing that without some evidence?

For mRNA vaccines, this is the first time they've ever been produced at all, and it's for the biggest vaccination campaign in history.

So I can see how that can't go much faster.

For regular tech vaccines, you're probably right.

OK, but conversely there were literally no mRNA vaccines mass produced a year ago, and now they are delivering hundreds of millions of doses this year - so they've clearly being able to scale production quite quickly.

Its a big claim to say another $100B wouldn't have scaled it faster. I'm sure they still have bottlenecks, and financial risks they weren't willing to take.

$100B is a lot of resources - but a justified amount given the economic costs, which is the point.

If you're writing software, and want the project to be completed faster, does throwing another $100B at a project make it go faster? Usually, this will slow it down, not make it go faster. A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process.

This is a similar sort of process. There's extremely specialized knowledge held by only a tiny number of people, and though there is a plan to vastly expand production, it's never been done before.

The bottleneck is not money, the bottleneck is people. People who have undoubtedly been working themselves to the bone to get this done as quickly as possible.

>If you're writing software

Yes, 100% yes.

Adding substantial resources can hugely speed up a project.

I will requisition the very best engineers, the best support staff, remove all financial bottlenecks, dedicate shadowing teams to work in isolation in parallel on the critical sections, etc.

> A classic of the software engineering industry, The Mythical Man Month, is all about this process.

First off, if i recall correctly, and it's probably been 20 years since I read it, that mostly applies to late projects that have already gone off the rails.

The broader point isn't true anyway. We're way better at writing software than we used to be.

I've personally been on quite a few software projects where they became more strategic or promising than they initially seemed, and we threw more engineers at them to speed them up, and they sped up excellently.

They're not writing software. Insofar as the vaccine is like software, they wrote the software in about a week. The problem is deploying the software.

This is a mechanical problem. It involves setting up assembly lines. These lines consist of expensive medical equipment, highly skilled installation experts, and skilled operators.

$100 billion could definitely buy or lease more equipment, get it installed, get it inspected, and pay more operators to operate the equipment. It could pay for for scientists and technicians working in related med-tech fields. It could pay their current employers to lend them from their current jobs, guaranteeing their positions upon return. The money could likewise supply any needed training, and if necessary, it could pay them extra money and extra vacation to compensate for the disruption in their lives from working third-shift, so that the machines run overnight.

Money to the tune of billions and hiring lots of the best people is specifically what makes it so people don't have to "[work] themselves to the bone".

Money and time. You can't make the assembly lines overnight, but enough money could make them in a few months. Just copy the designs for the machines they already have. There is probably opportunity to make more efficient machines as well, there almost always is, but that takes longer than a blind copy. Better in the long run, but takes longer to work out the bugs in the new design.

This is very different than software. We have plants producing this, we only need to replicate them, all the machines in those plants have drawings, the plants have drawings, the process is documented. It's not like some Ph.D. dude is mixing up liquids in a test tube.

Now granted any money in the world won't have the plant replicated by tomorrow, but enough money will have it replicated much faster. And the process could have been started months ago. Pretty much any vendor will do things faster if you pay them more money and I'm sure this is true for Pfizer's various vendors here. You can order some machine part produced in 3 months or in 3 days (with the latter being like x20 the price, but who cares now).

Yet you presume that the current price is magically the correct one - even though that price is different by region.

What would you say the effect of the government offering half as much would be? 1/10th? At one point does economics matter? I think once you admit money matters on the downside, you have a hard time proving that the point it zeros out of effect as it increases exactly matches the arbitrary point it was actually set at.

A tech comparison would be 4 or maybe 3 nm chips. Imagine everybody in the world would fork over 200B and order 7 billion chips this year... your constraint in that case is the manufacturing equipment and there are only so many experts in that area. The vaccine technologies we are using are scaled for the first time so you don’t have a big pool of experts or companies. The Chinese vaccine is probably the one best suited for scaling up and they are doing that rapidly.

It's a far more remarkable claim that $100B would improve production capacity, since that's a tiny tiny fraction of the costs of delay.

But if you think that producers are intentionally holding back, and don't understand mRNA vaccine differences from adenovirus vaccines that have been used forever, this might help:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

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