But shouldn’t this update our priors towards mostly being on the happy timeline, in the West as well? Given that it took Sinovac/China one year from last March to this March to scale up, and that their vaccines are easier to manufacture than mRNA vaccines, and if we assume high investment from the start in China (so their timeline is close to optimal), it really starts to look like we could not have done much better on manufacturing (because the West does not differ strongly in available doses compared to China)?
I.e. we could have approved a few months earlier, but even in December the UK and the US (I think?) were mostly bottlenecked by supply issues, so an earlier approval should not have changed much by this intuition.
Not mostly happy, I think. China apparently needed a new factory, but other places didn’t (to the tune of 3bn wasteful doses or ~12bn real ones).
Also fast approval was only one prong of the fix, along with 2) an order of magnitude more investment, 3) invested much earlier, as pre-Phase I pre-purchases, 4) HCTs, and 5) pivoting away from 80%+ waste as soon as we realise we’re doing that.
(HCTs are still relevant here because some of the vaccines have a shelf life < 6 months, and HCTs could thus allow May-June 2020 production to dampen the second or third waves.)
Half a trillion dollars should really make some dent in the known and unknown bottlenecks. Not sure how to shrink my estimate to account for the immovable remainder.
But shouldn’t this update our priors towards mostly being on the happy timeline, in the West as well? Given that it took Sinovac/China one year from last March to this March to scale up, and that their vaccines are easier to manufacture than mRNA vaccines, and if we assume high investment from the start in China (so their timeline is close to optimal), it really starts to look like we could not have done much better on manufacturing (because the West does not differ strongly in available doses compared to China)?
I.e. we could have approved a few months earlier, but even in December the UK and the US (I think?) were mostly bottlenecked by supply issues, so an earlier approval should not have changed much by this intuition.
Not mostly happy, I think. China apparently needed a new factory, but other places didn’t (to the tune of 3bn wasteful doses or ~12bn real ones).
Also fast approval was only one prong of the fix, along with 2) an order of magnitude more investment, 3) invested much earlier, as pre-Phase I pre-purchases, 4) HCTs, and 5) pivoting away from 80%+ waste as soon as we realise we’re doing that.
(HCTs are still relevant here because some of the vaccines have a shelf life < 6 months, and HCTs could thus allow May-June 2020 production to dampen the second or third waves.)
Half a trillion dollars should really make some dent in the known and unknown bottlenecks. Not sure how to shrink my estimate to account for the immovable remainder.