August 28, 2020: “Production has started at a new plant in Beijing with an annual capacity of roughly 300 million doses. Sinovac has agreed to supply 40 million doses to Bio Farma, an Indonesian state-owned company, between November and March. Sinovac started building the factory in late March and finished the project in July.”
So this is in fact a little piece of the happy timeline.
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.
“Someone please ensure that they have the 530k within 24 hours from now and report back to me it’s been sent,” Cummings wrote to the chief executive of NHSX. “No procurement, no lawyers, no meetings, no delay please – just send immediately,” he continued. The funding request had the backing of the health secretary, Matt Hancock, who was copied in on the email chain at this point...
After a flurry of communication between top civil servants, money for Our World in Data was approved within days and put on NHSX’s budget, the Guardian understands.
… the grant was not even wanted by the not-for-profit in the form being offered… The group chose to follow its own due process and later applied formally to DHSC and was awarded a grant.
“What a waste of time when we were at that position in the pandemic. I think it was unethical, immoral, and an abuse of power,”
It’s interesting that (being from the Guardian), that article presents the story as being a scandal, with the implication that Cummings was being corrupt.
August 28, 2020: “Production has started at a new plant in Beijing with an annual capacity of roughly 300 million doses. Sinovac has agreed to supply 40 million doses to Bio Farma, an Indonesian state-owned company, between November and March. Sinovac started building the factory in late March and finished the project in July.”
So this is in fact a little piece of the happy timeline.
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.
Datum about process over speed in the civil service and civil society (and also about OWID being far more savvy about optics than Cummings):
It’s interesting that (being from the Guardian), that article presents the story as being a scandal, with the implication that Cummings was being corrupt.