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Comment by pa7x1 | Hacker News Reader

Most developed countries seem to be able to deploy close to 100% of the vaccines provided so far, modulo whatever strategy they have chosen regarding keeping some amount of second doses in storage. So that doesn't seem to be bottleneck.

Israel simply paid more and bought a larger amount of vaccines delivered earlier. Which is smart but it's not a strategy that all countries can replicate, not because we cannot afford it but simply because there is a bottleneck in production. There is not enough vaccines for all no matter how much we pay, so we would end up competing in price for no real speed up.

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The US, which is what I have seen data for, is nowhere close to 100%. It's at ~75% per https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

Now some states _are_ close to 100%. Some are close to 60%. Investigating the differences in approach that lead to those differences in numbers mostly comes down to whether states prioritize vaccinating people or creating complicated rules and sticking to them.

When combined with things like this from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/14/w... : "Instead we have a patchwork of approvals and I have 70m doses that I can’t ship because they have been purchased but not approved. They have a shelf life of six months; these expire in April.", it sure seems like a large part of the apparent supply bottleneck is self-inflicted. Some basic "if it's approved in another G-8 country (or whatever criterion you want to pick) we should auto-approve it here" logic would probably significantly help with this sort of thing....

We ended up paying more (not much more at $20/shot "MSRP" apparently) but I think a greater part of that was contributing anonymized medical data. Statistical data on: groups vaccinated, positive test results, treatments in case of infection, etc. is worth a lot. That would also explain the swift deliveries, despite making that stats deal fairly late in the process. (early 2021)

I have yet to be convinced that paying the vaccine suppliers more is zero sum. More money potentially means more production / faster scaling up.

Vaccine production started way before the Phase 3 results were out. You cannot know ahead of time for which vaccines you should make a strong bet. Now we can prop-up production of the successful vaccines and they are doing so.

Anyway, getting the first vaccines is always going to be zero-sum for the same reason getting first-row in a concert is zero sum.

"You cannot know ahead of time for which vaccines you should make a strong bet."

Actually you can. When dealing with a pandemic causing the level of disruption we've seen, you throw money at propping up production of every serious vaccine candidate, hoping that at least one of them works out.

Yeah, overpaying and betting on 20 candidates in parallel is the reasonable thing to do, even if you're cynical enough to not care about the loss of life or health.

Every additional day of lockdown probably costs as much as the entire production lifecycle of a vaccine, including distribution.

I think the EU economy contracted at least 5% in 2020. The EU GDP was $18.3 tn, so 5% is about $915bn. That's $2.5bn per day (!). And that's just the direct impact, the whole psychological, PTSD, etc. longer term impact probably makes that higher, I'd be shocked if the total cost isn't something like $3bn per day.

6.8%. https://www.brusselstimes.com/economics/154783/euro-zone-gdp...

That makes things even worse. We're talking about a drop about the size of the entire Spanish economy.

They should have been throwing money at every reputable vaccine producer, including burning all red tape to make sure that excessive production capacity will be ready before the final approval is even given.

We have already done so, the first production was potentially at a loss if the Phase 3 results were not good. And we have done so for each vaccination effort out there. So there is already a lot of oversupply we may be throwing.

To be clear, I agree that the return on investment of a quick and successful vaccination campaign is so big that it makes sense to aggressively bet on it. But I also think the evidence shows we have bet quite aggressively on it, at least to unprecedented levels.

What I cannot comment on is how much better we could have done, the supply chain and logistics of producing 1 x (world population) for each candidate vaccine in the hopes at least one of them works and we can roll-it out quickly are so ridiculously complicated I don't know how it could have been made to work. I fear I would just be misdirecting my frustration with the current situation and an incomplete understanding of the problem from the comfort of my armchair.

I don't have confidence that (in the case of the EU) the same politicians that just claimed that they couldn't foresee any problems with mass production, did everything they could've done to ramp up production last summer. On the contrary the EU ordered quite late and less than they got offered from the vendors. In addition, the EU doubled the ordered doses only this January from 300M (100M of those were optional) to 600M from Biontech, after some EU member states also made additional orders. Imagine these orders would've been made in July. That might have provided the financial incentive for the vendor to e.g. ramp up an additional production line or factory in summer. I can't say whether this would have helped or not, but I certainly don't have the feeling the EU did everything they could have done to make the vaccine available as soon as possible.

My 81-year old grandparents will get their first dose of vaccine on February 28, while other countries are already vaccinating much younger people.

Imaginig that we ordered these doses in July, we would still have had close to 4 doses per person in the EU by July. Ordering more now didn't do anything ggod so far. Especially since these suppliers convientently left out when these additional doses they offered the EU would have been and will be available.

Aside from that: The US, UK and Israel have all proven that it is possible to do better than the EU here. They didn't know as well and ordered way sooner and more. AFAIR the UK even recently claimed that they vaccinated more people than the EU even in absolute numbers.

I think you'd be seeing some improvements as we are seeing some upward adjustments in production capacity projections on a 3-6 month timeframe now that everyone is spending so much to get additional doses because of political pressure, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to change the situation drastically as some have been claiming.

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