I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from “having the vaccine”.
It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think that’s the earliest reasonable date you could claim that “we had the vaccine”. If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, that’s when you could start.
(Of course, if you did that you’d presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didn’t work out, of which there’s no shortage.)
But it’s a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But I’m not sure they would have even if they were allowed to—that’s a pretty huge reputational risk.
I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from “having the vaccine”.
It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think that’s the earliest reasonable date you could claim that “we had the vaccine”. If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, that’s when you could start.
(Of course, if you did that you’d presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didn’t work out, of which there’s no shortage.)
I think even this is pretty optimistic because there was very little manufacturing capacity at that point.
I didn’t say a lot of arms. 😛
But it’s a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But I’m not sure they would have even if they were allowed to—that’s a pretty huge reputational risk.
Fair point—updated accordingly. (The core point remains.)