Hacker News Reader

Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

There was time. I work in manufacturing, we plan factories years in advance of manufacturing start. Abandoned biotech factory cost is a drop in the ocean compared to weekly lockdown cost. Why countries failed here? If I would do such crap professionally, shelves of electronics stores would be empty.

View on HN

There were/are multiple vaccine candidates with different production needs. How do you decide which factories to build? I think there are a lot of unrealistic expectations when it comes to these highly sophisticated vaccines. It's not comparable to your average electronics product.

Build 10 damn factories if needed. For biotech it is cheap - hundreds of millions, not billion range as for semiconductor. As a reminder - saving Lufthansa alone consumed €9B: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52801131

Sure, and it is the mney that is building these factories? You need people, you need certification. And that is once the building and equipment is their. No dea why people always ignore the time aspect of supply chains. Having more capacity in 4 months isn't any good now. Nor is it n 4 months when existing capacites are suffcient in 4 months anyway.

And they are using new site, Biontech in Marburg (a reporposed existing facility if memory serves well), Sanofi will be ready in summer to produce the Biontech vaccine as well. These things take time, rushing them is never a good idea.

There's a lot of software engineers here who are used to having a prototype banged out in a few weeks and think it applies to everything else.

> How do you decide which factories to build?

All of them. Or at least all of the different kinds of factories (mRNA, vector, live vaccine) for the most promising candidates. If there is a shortage of something, force production, apply imminent domain, force cooperation. War against Corona should be handled like a war, not like a toilet paper shortage.

In a lot of regards the "vaccine shortage" (hint: there is no real shortage, we are currently just in the early ramp up phase of production) should exaclty be treated like the toilet paper shortage.

Not really, because toilet paper was a different issue, there was plenty of supply. With vaccines I want the 300 million doses made in the US the day it is approved. Then nothing for three weeks and then make the booster all at once . That isn't possible, but it is what we want. (As each country approves repeat for them)

A shortage is a is a mismatch between demand and supply. When you are in the ramp up of production, the art is to match these. That means a closely monitored planning covering both aspects. Which is exactly what was done with toilet paper.

Done right, one could even get away with not reserving the second shot from the first deliveries. Another parallel between toilet paper and vaccines is the sudden demand spikes, read additional orders from the EU in January, that resulted in reduced short term availablity.

Note that even if a vaccine/drug/etc. gets approval, people are still looking for side effects. The approval process is designed to catch and document such side effects, but only once you give it to millions of people you find out about the side effects that are more rare. Also, due to the extremely sped up approval process, you know only little about any long term side effects.

Ideally you spread the doses over a few weeks or months so that you can stop the vaccinations should any issues arise. I'm not saying the current distribution is fine, it's far too slow. But not even Israel has vaccinated everyone in a single day, nor would that be a god idea.

This is btw also the way Google play distributes updates. Instead of every user getting the update right away, they first give it to a small group, then that group increases gradually in numbers.

Absolutely agree. They should have started such projects back in February/March 2020. But while small countries can obtain quicker deliveries by ordering better, for large countries this venue is not open as manufacturing capacities are limited. My point was that looking at the problem in terms of how you ordered is misguided. Instead you should look at it in terms of how you have failed to help the manufacturers to expand production capacities.

You are an expert with hand-on experience. Here decisions were done by career politicians, who are utterly clueless in any hard science, and basically often have only one skill mastered - the skill of selling themselves to population to get voted in. Hence the results.

Electronics manufacturing is very different from pharmaceutical manufacturing. Decision-makers can't just magically hand-wave the problem away and if politicians were to invest money in building up the infrastructure for all possible vaccine solutions, they would later face huge criticism for wasting public finance on all the potential vaccines that didn't pan out. I'm still hugely impressed that we have any vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 just under a year after the virus was discovered.

We don't have vaccines thanks to politicians making mass production of vaccines a top national priority, we have them despite politicians, thanks to private companies and basic research done on universities.

Maybe your specific country handled things around covid great, but not the place I come from, not its neighbors, not the place I live in currently, and not its current neighbors (covered some 15 european states by this in east & west/south).

Money spent on vaccine infrastructure would be absolutely nothing, especially when pooled by few/many states together, compared to havoc covid is wreaking on economies and still will in incoming months, no way to avoid it. Plus the small benefit of actually saving many lives should also hold some, not only political capital.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com