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From what I understand, the problem with scaling the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines is that they use a novel process that hasn't been used for producing a vaccine at scale previously. They're having to build out entirely new factories and supply chains. This sort of work normally takes years.

Would throwing more money at the problem ease some bottlenecks in increasing production? maybe? Would it cut months off the time to complete the roll out? Plausibly. However, I don't think it'd make a huge difference to the speed of the roll out over the next six months or so. Some things just take time to ramp up.

> They also fail to privileging the status quo - "If we paid Tesla half as much money, would they produce fewer cars?"

They would quite certainly produce no car at all - the economics would not work out. But Teslas, and vaccines, are being produced, so you analogy seems pointless.

Right. So continue your reasoning: you are arguing that if we pay the minimum required to produce an item, from that point onwards, more money doesn't unlock additional production? I agree you need to be able to charge enough to cover costs; the question is what happens after that. Why does it require proof to suggest that paying someone slightly more than the absolute minimum they'd ask to do something will increase their willingness and ability to do it?

At 20/dose, companies could produce N. At 30/dose they could probably find a way to produce more (perhaps by spending money to retrofit an old machine, which at 20/dose wouldn't have been worth it). And at 100/dose they can afford to fly the device manufacturer out to personally oversee sped-up installation.

Money works well to speed things up until your project hits the the grindingly slow beast known as the federal bureaucracy. Then money potentially still works, but in ways that produce many negative externalities.

They've probably underpriced vaccine really. I guess we're spending $5-$40 per head and the value to the economy of getting back to normal a couple of months earlier is likely over $1000.

More money per dose might have increased the efforts of the vaccine producers to speed up production and given them more financial means to do so. However, this still would not have been the optimal solution.

This is a case, where governments should have directly funded the build-up of production capacity. We need production capacities at a level which is economically infeasibly from a vendors perspective. Internationally, we need to produce like 14 billion doses per year. This would mean that whole humanity could be vaccinated within a year. Which is what we need, if we want to erradicate Sars-cov-2. But if we manage to do that, most of those new plants would become redundant and thats exactly why the government needs to pay for them.

What I don't get is why the EU doesn't buy the vaccine patents from e.g. Pfizer (or failing that, buy Pfizer outright - it would still only cost a fraction of what the lockdowns and aid packages have cost) and release the patents into public domain, so all companies with the capability can produce the vaccine. If it could hasten the reopenings by just one month, it would still be a terrific ROI.

Because there are no companies around which can produce mRNA vaccine. The production process is very specific. Opening up the patents wouldn't help. There are cooperations with those production steps which are generic, like botteling of the vaccines. Fortunately, another factory for BioNTech (which are the people who are making the vaccine, Pfizer is just the large partner) opened up in Germany recently and is going to produce a significant amount of doses. But instead of 1 more like 10 of these factories should have been built.