IIRC, there were well over 20+ vaccines in the USA alone that were being developed. I dunno about other countries... it turned out that the mRNA (Pfizer / Moderna) and adenovirus (J&J / AstraZeneca) seem to have been the fastest at production.
Everyone who spent $Millions on other vaccines are still waiting for those tests to finish. Only if you were lucky enough to pick Pfizer / Moderna / AZ / J&J are you actually winning in the vaccine race right now. At this point, its looking like if you bet on the wrong vaccine, you lost your entire investment.
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USA spent billions on building "all the above". We have millions of AZ-doses sitting on the shelves, waiting for final approval (final tests just finished this past week).
UK ordered 4-doses per person (when only 2-doses are needed, and even though its not known if children can safely take the vaccine yet). That's another reason why UK is so fast: they aggressively bought extra vaccines at an extreme rate. UK plans to either sell, or donate, those extra vaccines later on.
By buying so much extra vaccine, UK ensured that they are at the front of the line when it comes to vaccine supply from the various companies.
That German Biontech was allowed to partner with Pfizer will probably have cost 100000 European lives at the end, while saving 200000 American ones.
If pandemic lockdowns cost about 10% of annual GDP, then pre-allocating 1% of GDP to vaccines seems pretty conservative if anything. That means something like $100-200 billion for the US or EU.
The EU should have just pre-allocated $100 billion on vaccines. That would have been enough to secure every adult a vaccine from the big four manufacturers, plus leave a big pot of money leftover for contingencies.
The lockdown is actually merciful for many businesses; it's cheaper to close a restaurant entirely than run it at 50% capacity, and it's the only way conventions and other events can get out of their contracts with their venues.
> By comparing counties with and without restrictions, the researchers conclude that only 7 percentage points of the 60 percentage point overall decline in business activity can be attributed to legal restrictions. Most of the decline resulted from consumers voluntarily choosing to avoid stores and restaurants.
Also compare: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/12/03/9423037...
That NPR article proceeds on the very unlikely assumption that unused vaccines will not be reallocated to other countries.
It's also hard to really judge the potential other scenarios in the overall situation; the US production ramp up is going to benefit everyone in the medium term, and it's not really clear that it would have been much different if BioNTech partnered with a different manufacturer (much of the work in the US is being done at purpose built contract manufacturer facilities; AstraZenaca and J&J share some sites...).
Edit: There's also the question of whether potential partners were really interchangeable, or if Pfizer has some advantage in knowledge or whatever.
And overspending by buying a hundred million doses of each of the 20 vaccines STILL would’ve been a massive bargain.
Some like AZ report low top line numbers like 60%, but you can look at the number of severe cases needing hospitalization. It's still approximately zero.
I'm not sure where your $10M number comes from, Canada is spending CAD170M (USD135M).