Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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The factories needed to be set up last year, before the vaccines were approved.

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.

At least for Moderna, it wasn’t pure luck to pick them. I was following it from near the beginning, and there was really solid data coming out on its effectiveness. Pfizer/Bio took a nearly identical approach.

And overspending by buying a hundred million doses of each of the 20 vaccines STILL would’ve been a massive bargain.

Moderna and Pfizer are the "best" vaccines but it doesn't matter that much - everyone of them out there is good enough. The flu shot is only 50% effective, and all of these are better.

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.

The US didn't spend significantly more than Europe, nor did the UK, but both did so a bit earlier and with more nationalistic approaches. Due to the production ramp this leads to 2-4 months delay for Europe. Still better than Canada or Mexico.

That German Biontech was allowed to partner with Pfizer will probably have cost 100000 European lives at the end, while saving 200000 American ones.

According to (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vacci...) the US spent at least 3x (10 billion) as the EU (3.2 billion).

Which if you look at the economic damage of a lockdown, either price is laughably cheap. Like this is a multi-trillion dollar economic event, spending even 10x that much would still likely be a "deal".

Agree. I think a fair approach rather than targeting price would have been to pre-allocate a percent of the economic impact of the lockdown.

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.

Note you don't even need the "lockdown" for the economic damage, it will happen anyway. People don't want to go to restaurants if it's going to kill their grandma.

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.

https://www.nber.org/digest/aug20/consumers-fear-virus-outwe...

> 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.

Even if this lockdown fan favorite is correct it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is that one country is done vaccinating earlier than another and being done earlier is cheaper than being done later.

The article says 10bn was the budget of project Warpspeed not the spend. I also would call into doubt the 3.2bn figure. The UK alone spent 2.9bn pounds on vaccines.

Also compare: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/12/03/9423037...

US spending exceeds $10 billion: https://time.com/5921360/operation-warp-speed-vaccine-spendi... (the Biden administration has since committed further funds also)

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.

Canada ordered 9.6 doses per person, and we're substantially behind the US/UK.

Yeah, six months ago I thought Canada would do best because they ordered the most choices. In hindsight I now know they should have ordered less and instead invested in a supply chain for what they ordered. It would have been more of a gamble though. I wonder if they could have built a MRNA plant that could flex to moderna or Pfizer, and similar for the other 4 vaccine technologies (that I can't spell), even though only two are significant so far. (With promising futures for the others )

Considering it's taking 18 months to build a NovaVax plant, I don't think a plan based on domestic production would have helped.

Plants can be built faster if you are willing to pay more.

Canada is spending $170M on this one. I don't think more money would help.

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