JCC: Michael Kremer had worked on groundbreaking pneumococcal vaccine research in the past. Early in 2020, he realized there would be a profound need for research into financing COVID-19 vaccines. He thus reached out to several people and put together a team of economists that included some of his former colleagues and some new people (such as myself).
At the start of our work, we saw that some of the hurdles that had to be cleared to develop a vaccine were no longer a problem, since phase I and II clinical trials were already underway for several vaccine candidates. However, we realized that it would not be easy to translate successful trials into large-scale vaccination quickly, since few steps had been taken to set in place the capacity to manufacture vaccines. So we focused our work on financing large-scale manufacturing capacity that would allow for quick, large-scale vaccination as soon as vaccine trials were successful.
For those interested in the work Michael Kremer (Giving What We Can member and 2019 Nobel Laureate in Economics) and his spouse and fellow GWWC member Rachel Glennerster have done on COVID-19 vaccine supply, our team profiled one of their co-authors this week — Juan Camilo Castillo of UPenn. An excerpt is below / the link is here: https://innovationexchange.mayoclinic.org/market-design-for-covid-19-vaccines-interview-with-upenn-professor-castillo/
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JCC: Michael Kremer had worked on groundbreaking pneumococcal vaccine research in the past. Early in 2020, he realized there would be a profound need for research into financing COVID-19 vaccines. He thus reached out to several people and put together a team of economists that included some of his former colleagues and some new people (such as myself).
At the start of our work, we saw that some of the hurdles that had to be cleared to develop a vaccine were no longer a problem, since phase I and II clinical trials were already underway for several vaccine candidates. However, we realized that it would not be easy to translate successful trials into large-scale vaccination quickly, since few steps had been taken to set in place the capacity to manufacture vaccines. So we focused our work on financing large-scale manufacturing capacity that would allow for quick, large-scale vaccination as soon as vaccine trials were successful.