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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it absolutely insane that we are resource constrained on solving a pandemic nearly 2 years into it?

The fact that the resource in question is a secret recipe is just astounding. If all of humanity worked to end this collectively, we would all be immensely better off. There shouldn't be moral questions about getting a third dose or sending it to countries without supply.

The reason for this is astounding and unbelievable profit based on decades of US federal research funding.

Moderna's most recent financial results: "Total revenue was $6.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021, compared to $75 million for the same period in 2020"

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d....

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Modena is using a lot of novel techniques that they have been pioneering for decades.

When a new technique is invented in molecular biology, it often takes quite a while for the expertise to percolate through the entire field. Often times, despite full protocols being published for the technique, a lab will adopt the new technique only when a person with prior experience joins the lab, and teaches everyone one hands on.

Thats just for small scale molbio that happens in small quantities on a bench top. Taking a technique through to large scale production, and doing it with high quality, and then also getting it to work under Good Manufacturing Process controls so that the thing you're making is suitable for injection into real living humans? That's an entirely different order of magnitude of difficulty.

Perhaps there's something that could have sped this up, but unless people are aware of the particular challenges that are being faced, it's hard to know what sort of intervention would have actually done this.

I think “secret recipe” is grossly underestimating the complexity involved here. It’s not like they added a pinch of cumin or something. This was greenfield lab science in March 2020, the fact that they’re producing as many of them as they are right now is stunning. If this were an easy process to scale up, why wouldn’t Moderna be doing so and capturing the profit? What’s the argument that they should divert a (possibly quite large) amount of resources to helping others produce it instead of focusing on making as much as they can?

Consider also the supply chain and logistics networks for getting materials to manufacturers and then distributing them all over the world in just a year's time.

While you might have a point about private companies profiting from US taxpayer funded research, I do not understand the purpose of comparing a company's revenue before their product was being sold to their revenue after their product started to be sold.

The social contract that has allowed the USA to DONATE 140 million vaccine doses to 93 countries is sorta built on the foundation of us having already supplied a dose to everyone domestically that wants one.. And getting our economic engine rev'd up again.

Again and again it's interesting to see the US step up when faced with these world wide challenges.

From bringing back peace and prosperity to Europe to protecting the western world during the cold war, it's something to see the country working hard fighting covid abroad, having invested resources for decades in fundamental research to finally be able to produce a vaccine like that.

Only in America!

> Only in America!

This is... not really true. The US is indeed in the lead in COVAX donations at 45 doses pledged per million dollars of GDP, and that's laudable. But it's not like no other country is close; France follows closely on the US's heels at 44, with the UK not far off at 38, Germany and the Netherlands are at 27 and 29, and so on — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covax-donations-per-gdp

Nor is it true that the fundamental research for all the major vaccines came out of the US. Moderna indeed was, but the Pfizer vaccine was developed by BioNTech (Germany), and the Astrazeneca vaccine was developed by the University of Oxford (UK).

> Only in America!

I'm not disparaging what the US has done during the pandemic (I have issues with a couple of your other examples, but that's not for this thread). I do however take exception to the final sentence.

Astra Zeneca (UK/Sweden) has shipped over a billion doses, is massively (hugely) cheaper, and has production in 15 countries. And the reason for the cost (as little as a tenth of some others) is simple - not profiteering.

So likewise, not "only in the UK" either, but both our nations need to move on from our exceptionalism and the assumption (in general) that the rest of the world does less.

A big chunk of the funding for Astra Zeneca came from the United States [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...

Weren't many of the vaccines that America donated actually AstraZenica? IIRC the US bought 100m and they never got FDA approval, so we just gave them away.

There's a difference between "making" or "shipping" a vaccine and "donating."

A lot of people are nitpicking or saying irrelevant shit in response to this, so I wanted to say I think you hit the nail square on the head.

There's a lot of countries with a vaccine uptake in the single digits, and if global health was a real concern we'd be doing something about it, or at least talking about it. Instead, as an example, Ireland's government are implementing a vaccine passport and buying 5x as many booster shots as the entire population... Ireland has a 90% vaccination rate.

Our pundits are talking mad shit about the 10% of unvaccinated people, blaming them for the whole virus, while other countries have a 99+% unvaccinated rate. There's sensible 'putting on your own oxygen mask first', then there's selfishness, and then there's bizarro-world whatever-the-fuck this is; beyond delusion and greed and terror.

> Moderna's most recent financial results: "Total revenue was $6.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021, compared to $75 million for the same period in 2020"

Careful, not profits, revenues. It costs them something to manufacture the vaccine. WeWork and Uber have great revenues, but I wouldn't accept an offer from them with a share of the profits!

> If all of humanity worked to end this collectively, we would all be immensely better off.

True, and yet

> based on decades of US federal research funding.

One country seems to be footing the bill for the whole world (and it's not even where the pandemic originated). Other countries are free to finance cutting edge research and add a clause they own the intellectual property to it for use in their country.

> One country seems to be footing the bill for the whole world

It really isn't. You need to widen your news sources.

For the Moderna vaccine, yes. I don't think the company had international funding.

Foreign companies also received significant investments from the United States [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...

Better to be resource constrained than solution constrained because we haven’t got one because the incentives in our economic system didn’t motivate the founders to create a Moderna in the first place.

How many global pandemics world solved before?

Not really surprising because viruses are more economically efficient than capitalists. Outspending natural disasters is a bad time. Nature has a blank check to wreck our stuff, sadly

As Charlie Munger said: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome". The version of capitalism we chose to set up over the last 70-200 years isn't really well suited for these kinds of problems.

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