US throws out millions of doses of Covid vaccine as world goes wanting
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But hey the Guardian needs clickbait.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/03/1023822...
Except in case of vaccines during early periods if one bought entire supply there isn’t anymore for anyone else.
Other wealthy countries such as EU countries allowed other countries to buy at critical times too, at the expense of their own supply, for the greater good.
The US did ban exports. There is no law that says that exports are banned, but the US made sure no one else could buy vaccines made in the US.
It's also completely false that every other country did that. As a Canadian I remember very vividly the EU allowing us to buy their vaccines and us receiving them while multiple large EU countries had less than 10% vaccination rate.
Equally, China exported millions of doses when their vaccination rates were in the single digits.
Macron was trying to deflect blame to the US because his constituents were angry that his administration didn't secure doses. The US didn't do anything "to make sure no one else could buy vaccines made in the US" except to buy the supply.
> It's also completely false that every other country did that. As a Canadian I remember very vividly the EU allowing us to buy their vaccines and us receiving them while multiple large EU countries had less than 10% vaccination rate.
My claim was "all countries prioritized vaccinating their own citizens before donating", and yes, that is true. Moreover, again, the US didn't do anything to stop sales of domestically produced vaccines. At this point, you're willfully repeating misinformation.
> Equally, China exported millions of doses when their vaccination rates were in the single digits.
Again, you're conflating exports and donations.
The US objectively prevented the sale of US produced vaccines. No country in the world has been able to do so and many tried. Something in the US prevented other countri s from buying us made vaccines.
I'm not contacting exports and donations at all. I'm comparing doses supplied to doses supplied.
throwaway894345 is right and you are wrong. There is and has never been a US vaccine export ban, and the US has not seized vaccines meant for other countries. If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not.
The Trump administration last year signed gigantic contracts for every planned vaccine, because no one knew which ones would work. Like, enough for every American from one manufacturer, let alone the current four major available ones. More importantly, the contracts guaranteed the US the earliest deliveries.
By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout the article that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.)
The UK signed a similar contract for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU and Canada did not assure themselves of such quantities. Canada also bet on CanSino because it was afraid that the US would ban vaccine exports (which, again, never happened). Of course, the Chinese did not live up to the contract.
Before you say "But what about—", the Trump executive order from December 2020 merely sets up the legal framework to prohibit exports if desired. But that does not mean that the framework is invoked. Let me repeat: The US signed contracts that were a) huge in size/scope and b) from every pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, which c) got the country the largest and among the first deliveries. The UK did the same thing with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and spent a lot of money to retool domestic plants to produce it in addition to the non-UK doses it bought.
By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that
* all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September
* all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed
* the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh?
(I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.)
>Other wealthy countries such as EU countries allowed other countries to buy at critical times too, at the expense of their own supply, for the greater good.
The EU (Italy, specifically) did specifically ban exporting doses purchased by Australia. Again, the US never did any such thing; all US doses were purchased by the US. The EU did not implement a wider export ban because it was afraid that the US would ban exports of components the EU needs for vaccine manufacture.
If the situation were different, might the US have implemented a ban on exporting doses already designated for another country, similar to what the EU did implement toward Australia? Perhaps. But, fortunately, the US never faced this issue, because of the huge amounts of money it invested a year ago and the contracts it signed with said money.
Last time there were battles on Belgian soil was Napoleon. Germans kind of breezed through twice. Contemporary Belgium however is bordered by two nuclear powers.
Who is the US protecting Belgium with all of this, since the USSR dissolved ?
The action these days is in Poland, Ukraine and the eastern Baltic countries. Even Germany moved a number of armored divisions there.
I hardly see Russia with less than a quarter of the industrial output and half the population walk it all the way to Brussels. I mean... we're not in 1815 anymore...
Moreover, NATO infrastructure and nukes only make it a prime target for ballistic missiles.
I'd be interested in how you get to a positive benefit vs. risk balance in their case. I might have missed some major contrary arguments.
It just seemed odd to me that it came off as one sided in the comment. As if the favor was entirely from Belgium to the US.
> As if the favor was entirely from Belgium to the US.
I get what you say.
Anyways, we'd all do better to demilitarize a little. The current geopolitical trends are really worrying.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/21/british-spie...
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/u...
There's plenty of legitimate criticism for the US government; I'm not sure why people feel the need to invent more.
Letting vaccine go to waste is a bad look, but realistically it's probably just logistically more expensive to collect all of the unused vaccine from all over the US and get it shipped to the right places than it is to get new supply delivered directly to those countries.
> 500 million dollars of charity while I'm sure is appreciated is worth a lot less than timely vaccinations of the most vulnerable.
It's not "500 million dollars", it's 1 billion doses plus working out the delivery and distribution logistics. Moreover, it's supremely unfair to criticize the US for failing to donate the vaccines sooner when the US is donating them far sooner than all other countries combined. Yes, like every other country, the US prioritized its own citizens, but unlike any other country, it's gone above and beyond to vaccinate the poorest countries as quickly as possible.
There's plenty of valid stuff to criticize about the US (e.g., climate policy), but the US nailed vaccine policy.
The US has not delivered 1 billion doses. It has only delivered 100 or so million. Of those, it has not worked out the distribution logistics, I assure you those countries still had to do the legwork.
I have you five examples of countries that did not withhold their exports untill they had saturated their demand. The US is the only country that refused exports untill it literally couldn't use vaccines anymore.
Agreed, 1 billion were pledged. Hundreds of millions have been delivered. In either case, that's more than all other countries combined.
> Of those, it has not worked out the distribution logistics, I assure you those countries still had to do the legwork.
It was a partnership, but the US is making sure vaccine pledges are actually being administered while other rich countries are faltering. The US is even partnering with the EU so that the EU can use the US logistics framework to realize their pledges.
> I have you five examples of countries that did not withhold their exports untill they had saturated their demand. The US is the only country that refused exports untill it literally couldn't use vaccines anymore.
You're repeating the same lies here again:
1. We're talking about donations, not exports
2. The US didn't prevent exports
Would you rather buy groceries, or find that the shelves are empty and go to the food bank for the things the rich people in the next neighborhood donated because they couldn't use?
A much more apt analogy would be: "would you rather not be able to afford groceries, or would you rather have a rich person buy your groceries and deliver them to you?"
The US has not exported more doses than anyone else - China alone has exported more than a billion vaccines, and the US between 100-200 million. Even the EU is ahead.
If the choice is wait one and a half years for groceries I need now or pay less than it costs me to actually cook them into food to get them now, I'll choose the later 100% of the time.
This is blatant misinformation. The US never banned export of doses.
> The US has not exported more doses than anyone else - China alone has exported more than a billion vaccines, and the US between 100-200 million. Even the EU is ahead.
This is also blatant misinformation. You're comparing foreign exports to US donations. The US has donated more doses than all other countries combined.
I'm comparing doses supplied to doses supplied. It matters very little if the dose was paid or not when the issue isn't lack of money but lack of supply. Hell, the costs to administer the dose is higher than the cost of the actual vaccine.
> I'm comparing doses supplied to doses supplied. It matters very little if the dose was paid or not when the issue isn't lack of money but lack of supply. Hell, the costs to administer the dose is higher than the cost of the actual vaccine.
Not at all. There's nothing impressive about Europe allowing its Pharma companies to sell vaccines to rich countries while allowing poor countries to fend for themselves. The poor countries are the ones with ~1% vaccination rates, so what matters are donations.
> Hell, the costs to administer the dose is higher than the cost of the actual vaccine.
Not in third world countries, but yes, the cost of the logistics is immense and the US is footing both the cost of the vaccine and the logistics.
Thankfully 50% of your country graciously declined vaccines so the rest of us could get vaccinated. Those citizens are the real heroes of the pandemic don’t you agree?
And nobody said US is an awful country.
The reluctance to invest in production capacity demonstrated by both the Trump administration and the Biden administration is disappointing. People like to reply to points like this by highlighting the unambitious investments that did get made. I don't pretend to know what the actual limits of production are, but I'm pretty skeptical that we got near them.
Edit: A year after it was reasonably clear we had viable vaccines, we are something like 10 billion doses short of global coverage. That's what I am comparing 100 million to.
Government wealth comes from tax collection and from the people. While we want to help the world there are constraints on how much we can do.
I don't think I am mischaracterizing this, am I?
"You can't help others if you yourself are in need of help."
"Before You Help Others, You Must First Help Yourself"
"Before you assist others, always put your oxygen mask on first."
"Self-sufficiency is a prerequisite to charity."
Agreed, but focusing on self-only is proclaimed to be selfish, is it not? Have Western nations not had the means for many years to dramatically decrease deaths in foreign countries for relatively modest sacrifices?
There are certainly no shortage of persuasive memes, platitudes, and general rhetoric that exert significant influence on people's perception of this matter, but I prefer addressing it from a strict epistemic perspective.
--
That fact is not compatible with the assertion of focusing on self only.
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to your point:
Sure.
But as so often happens the only disagreement we really have is the level at which aid is given.
Shall we not just give away everything for the greater good until we have nothing left?
I don't suppose to have perfect knowledge of the exactly balance we can give with out reducing our self to a position of requiring then help from others.
It's dishonest to ignore all the aid we give around the world.
So if giving the most aid of any country is not enough...
What amount is enough?
[1] https://www.wristband.com/content/which-countries-provide-re...
A bunch of pharmacies threw out expired vaccine doses.
Obviously there is a sinister conspiracy here.
/s
I don't think the US is evil, I think people have a poor understanding of how little it would cost to help the rest of the world a lot more with vaccination and am disappointed that we are not doing it.
> Shall we not just give away everything for the greater good until we have nothing left?
It's not the disagreement that I find interesting, it's the consistency between the claimed ideology (and the self-righteous, hyper-confident manner in which it is often delivered) preached by The Righteous when it comes to certain parts of COVID, combined with the "That's different/Whataboutism!" card that is played when things are not quite to the liking of these people, or the interesting way in which they calculate "selfishness" with 100% confidence in their correctness, while typically being unable/unwilling to give even a pseudocode explanation of how they calculate it.
> It's dishonest to ignore all the aid we give around the world.
I am not denying that America is the most generous nation on the planet, it is the self-righteous and hypocritical attitude of many Americans that I think is interesting.
> What amount is enough?
I think one's walk should match one's talk.
I truly don't see how I can constructively respond to your previous post. We have reached an impasse and I wish you the best.
The US could start paying (the reasonable, cost based) price for every single Covid 19 vaccination that takes place and forget about it, it isn't that big a sum of money. Meanwhile, we've, by choice, only done a bit.
This is what I disagree with. They picked relatively low targets and invested against those. Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. And it's production rate that is the bottleneck, not the decision to donate or whatever.
Citation needed. Scaling an industry from nothing in a year is a herculean task. I’m a staunch Trump critic, but Operation Warp Speed worked pretty well (if only because DJT got out of the way). The production rates are damn impressive and it’s not like anyone had any idea about how much vaccine we would be able to produce or how quickly. Arguments from hindsight aren’t particularly convincing.
The piece the New York Times did on production of the Pfizer vaccine makes it pretty clear that a lot of the production is not new (bioreactors and the like). I realize it isn't trivial to do that sort of production, and don't really disagree with "Arguments from hindsight aren't particularly convincing.", but I also haven't seen a single piece of information on what fundamental limit was run into. The mixing of the mRNA and lipids got a lot of attention, but there wasn't any clear 'here's why we can't go twice as fast' information published, as far as I saw.
When the doses could be used, the US jealously guarded them, while the EU, Russia, China and even Cuba shared.
The 100 million doses that were "donated" almost two years later is a very poor excuse for hogging the supply when it mattered most.
As for the optics or donating - it was done only so that the US could say "we donated the most" while many, many countries actually supplied a lot more. Paying 3-4$ per dose is not an issue for almost any country, and when it actually is the EU, Russia, China et al. had no issues discounting or even donating them.
The EU and China started arranging the export of vaccines before even they had a regular supply. Talks for the export of vaccines from those countries started almost two years ago from now, ie, early 2020.
If your house is burning down, do you let your neighbor use your water hose before you can put out your own fire?
Various other countries solved this better. For example, I know two that swapped a large amount of vaccines. One had vaccines near their use-by date in a warehouse, the other thought it could use them in time, and promised to supply the first country with vaccines with later use-by dates.
> In the face of global inequities, it’s not as simple as states donating unused vaccines. The doses already distributed to states can’t be repurposed internationally because of bureaucratic and safety concerns around storing the vaccines correctly.
This is alongside a global crisis for shipping anything using cargo ships
The article is much more levelheaded and explains why fairly well, so it's by definition clickbait IMO.
Not saying they're not factual (mostly they are), just that they have editorial bias that serves the readership while also having to state facts (some of them are pro-US).
Edit: @simonh - Agreed, Right wing media is completely off the rails, but not sure we need to compare here. I wasn't advocating it.
Look, I'm a serial conservative voting Brit. I'm no leftie, but OMG Fox News and the Daily Mail take the biscuit. In the unlikely event I ever were to vote left, one of those is far more likely to push me over the edge than the Guardian.
The headline is actually correct, and the nuance in the article only serves to explain but on the balance does not justify the US throwing out doses. This is made a lot more likely by the fact that the US is the only country that refuses to export vaccines and by the fact that other countries have exported unused doses.
The alt to reporting issues is "good news" reporting. We tried it for years and it was mostly vapid milquetoast. I was glad to see it go. I think follow-up stories to earlier issues works tho. Some of those will be positive.
note: The modern form of GNR is where the press parrots PR by biz/gov/leo - usually without any analysis.
Positive facts allow us to double down on what works. Negative facts allow us to inspect what went wrong.
It's awesome that a pumpkin patch 2 counties away raised $52.40 but it doesn't serve me as well as learning my legislator passed laws that harm me - in trade for fat campaign donations.
Yes, absolutely it's bad they're throwing it out. No debate there. But it's not like they can ship it somewhere else without it costing more than the food itself.
The solution is better understanding of who needs what and try to fill them as close as you can without going over too much. That will optimize usage of a product.
Other countries have done it. The US won't. It's clearly not anywhere close.
There is also no reason to fly to these locations. There is already the logistic capacity to ship in the proper conditions between these locations and a few central hubs. It just has to be run in reverse. It hasn't been done for hundreds of locations because few countries are as big as the US, but it has been done on a smaller scale by less capable actors.
You can't just duplicate existing routes. The logistics to collect unused vaccines from endpoints (on an insanely tight clock), would be enormously complex. We'd be setting that up on a nationwide scale, in the middle of a worldwide transportation shortage.
Further increasing exportable vaccine production would seem to be a more attainable goal.
You essentially have to "undo" that chain faster than the product will go bad to a place it will be utilized in time.
Otherwise you'd have to travel to the majority of pharmacies all around the US and some how get that all to the airport.
And trucks/delivery drivers are very very expensive at scale.
I imagine the effectiveness of anti-vax propaganda is tough to incorporate into distribution forecasts.
What if, for example, food that would spoil in a couple more days were simply moved to a "free" section of the grocery store? No need for complex shipping or logistics costs, simply ask the stocker to move from one aisle to another. Why don't grocery stores do that, if they're concerned about "reducing waste"?
First of all, vaccines aren't delivered internationally by ship, they are delivered by air cargo. Often by militaries, which will do it promptly at a moment's notice.
Second of all, "bureaucratic and safety concerns" is code for "we don't want to bother". Those are all things that can be worked around and have indeed been by other countries that had excess doses.
Or, hear me out, we could make sure other countries get doses straight from production sources instead of getting the just-about-to-expire doses left over from the US.
You also don't "overnight them to remote areas". You drop them off at the airport, then the other country either sends their military aviation or charters another countries cargos to pick them up.
Ok, that's fair. But the rest of your comments in this discussion have been about how the waste itself is the result of a lie and that, somehow, we can collect already distributed and started vials quickly enough to fly them to other countries and, somehow, distribute quickly enough within them for it to be worthwhile and not just a hurried rush to find out that people are getting little better than a placebo.
If you'd read my second paragraph, I suggest exactly what you did: Make sure countries get doses from the sources instead of fretting about waste that, itself, is useless because there is no logistical scheme in place or even reasonably achievable that can collect and redistribute these doses to make them useful.
EDIT: Now I'm glad I quoted you as you've edited your comment after my initial reply.
> You also don't "overnight them to remote areas". You drop them off at the airport, then the other country either sends their military aviation or charters another countries cargos to pick them up.
Practically speaking, once the vials are started the countdown begins. The only reasonable way to use the started vials in countries on other continents and distribute to their remote communities is to ship it as fast as possible, which means overnighting. You can't collect them and wait a week to ship them and then a week or more to get them distributed within the countries and expect a useful vaccine dose to be delivered.
Also, you've misquoted me. I did not say "overnight them to remote areas" as you suggest. I said "overnight those to airports in other countries". Those are two very different statements. Don't make fake quotes in your replies, it's dishonest.
You'll be surprised but generally plane flights take less than a week.
Ok so 224k wasted doses in Louisiana over around 6 months, 180 days. That's not even 2k doses per day, let's round up. There are probably more than 100 vaccination locations around Louisiana, so we're talking about no more than 20 doses per location being wasted (on average). Somehow, we're expected to totally reverse the distribution system every single night to collect at most 2k doses to take to an international airport and have, what, the other countries pay to have them shipped ASAP to their country. Let's say only 100 countries are sending aircraft, that's 20 doses that they're trying to get back to their people each day from Louisiana.
That's a totally reasonable approach, versus, say, getting them the initial batches instead.
> You'll be surprised but generally plane flights take less than a week.
Yes, but for 20 doses a day I doubt most countries would send or contract aircraft from Louisiana.
So about 10% of the loss was due to expiration, and that could have happened pretty far downstream, not in some massive central warehouse where someone could have sent a pallet of 20000 shots out.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_W...
The 2 metrics doesn't seem to go together.
Imagine the profits Pfizer is going to have. Hell of a quarter.
> some profit.
Ha! We’re talking 10s of billions.
Personally, I’m waiting for the Monsanto vaccine before I take it.
China is up to 1.3 billion vaccine exports while the US is lagging at 176 million. If anyone is vaccinating 70% of the world next year, it is going to be China.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - Richard Feynman.