trashcan wrote:
Pfizer has said they received no support for r&d, but moderna certainly did. Warp speed did contract to purchase from Pfizer in July.
I have never disputed warp Speed’s pumping money into Covid vaccine research. It seemed kind of obvious that, in addition to saving lives, a faster vaccine rollout means a faster return to normal-ish economic life, and increased tax revenue, so even the government should see a good return on this investment.
Honestly, my issue with Warp Speed was that $10B probably wasn’t enough. If more money could have generated more/faster/better vaccines it would have been well worth it. The question is whether any more relevant resources could have been mobilized in a timely manner. Could we have more production on-line if we invested more? I think the answer to that is probably yes.
mRNA vaccine research has been ongoing for over a decade. Moderna is named after modified RNA. Pfizer's COVID 19 development was done on the backs of years of publicly funded mRNA research. Whether the last mile to adapt the mRNA tech to COVID 19 was publicly funded or not is really not that big of a deal.
It is pretty obvious that there was no serious planning in the US, the EU or internationally for a post-approval vaccination effort. Efforts to promote open source for vaccines to allow third world countries to be able to manufacture their own supply were quickly quashed, which borders on the criminal given the race against variants. I think the presumption was pretty much that the mRNA vaccines would go to the first world countries and the much cheaper second string vaccines like Sinovax, Dr. Hotez's Baylor/Dynavax and the J&J vaccine would go to the third world. But the race against the variants is making that strategy very risky. And the slow rollout of the mRNA vaccines is even a big problem for the first world.
There should have been major international coordination to free up resources needed to stage an unprecedented world wide vaccination effort in record time. But we left everything up largely to the private markets. That means that production has to be on a timeline that is sufficiently profitable and every country has to fight with each other for supply.
For what it is worth, Biden is now saying that he wants 1.5 mil a day, which looks to be feasible if supply can meet demand. There has been some decent improvement in vaccine delivery and the current rate is above 1 mil a day. But that would still mean that most people will not get vaccinated until summer and the variants will have a chance to become fairly widespread this spring. If we can do 1.5 mil, we can certainly do 3 mil a day if we invoked the defense production act and forced the drug companies to license out production.