An early draft for subscribers: The bottom line for policy should still be what it was last August: needles-into-arms, as many as possible as fast as possible
I think it would be a great idea to vaccinate everyone on the planet in short order, but I'm curious about who would be producing the vaccine assuming the IP issues were dealt with. China and India, the two most likely producers, have been producing their own vaccines with varying levels of success. Neither has been in talks with Pfizer or Moderna with regards to licensing production of mRNA vaccines. Judging from what I've read in the journal Science and online, it isn't clear that they could build the necessary production facilities and operate at the necessary level. Alternatives would include other US or European producers, Russia, Israel, maybe Japan, but I'm not really sure of who else.
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be produced using a simpler technology and at a more modest cost, perhaps $10 for a two dose course as opposed to $30 for an mRNA vaccine. As of July, AZ has been producing the vaccine in Thailand, but is only producing 15M doses per month due to production problems. I'm guessing this will improve as the kinks are worked out, but vaccine production is hard, even for people who know how.
Absolutely agree that the vaccine must be produced in sufficient volume to vaccinate the globe. Part of the problem is intransigence of Big Pharma (and Germany) to waive IP and allow manufacture elsewhere. I well recall pharma saying it would take too long to do this, so no need. But many months have passed, the world is still far behind in getting vaccinated and it is now clear, to me at least, that this is mainly about control of IP and profits. Pfizer wanting to charge for booster shots is about putting profits ahead of wellbeing. The mentality of arms dealers.
It is also pretty clear that the shortage of workers is probably due workers fed up with low pay and being exposed to potentially hazardous situations. Not just exposure to Covid, but by customers who will hurt employees for trying to do their jobs. I have heard a lot about middle managers who are insisting a return to work in offices to maintain their micromanaging behaviors. Naturally, office real estate owners are talking their book saying there is a rush back to offices, and I am sure I have detected planted articles about lost productivity with remote work when the anecdotal experiences of those I talk to reveals the very opposite. I have no doubt that commercial real estate owners who are mortgaged to the hilt are worrying about calls on their loans as happened during the early 1990s recession in California, and again in after the Nasdaq collapse in 2000, and 2008/9.
It would really be nice to see wholesale changes in working conditions and benefits in the US, such as happened after the Black Death in Europe. US workers seem to be generally ignorant of working conditions and benefits in EU countries, wedded to the propaganda that the USA is best in everything and therefore elsewhere must be worse.
Awkward corollary -- that six-to-nine-month immunity window means that for planning purposes, we need to inoculate everyone on earth in three months. Given the storage lifetime of the vaccines, that implies things about the production process we don't have the capacity to achieve without far more investment that a private firm could arrange or will consider. It's not enough to spend public money; it will be necessary to create direct public production.
The plus side is that having built a 15 billion doses/quarter vaccine production infrastructure, there are other uses.
I think it would be a great idea to vaccinate everyone on the planet in short order, but I'm curious about who would be producing the vaccine assuming the IP issues were dealt with. China and India, the two most likely producers, have been producing their own vaccines with varying levels of success. Neither has been in talks with Pfizer or Moderna with regards to licensing production of mRNA vaccines. Judging from what I've read in the journal Science and online, it isn't clear that they could build the necessary production facilities and operate at the necessary level. Alternatives would include other US or European producers, Russia, Israel, maybe Japan, but I'm not really sure of who else.
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be produced using a simpler technology and at a more modest cost, perhaps $10 for a two dose course as opposed to $30 for an mRNA vaccine. As of July, AZ has been producing the vaccine in Thailand, but is only producing 15M doses per month due to production problems. I'm guessing this will improve as the kinks are worked out, but vaccine production is hard, even for people who know how.
Absolutely agree that the vaccine must be produced in sufficient volume to vaccinate the globe. Part of the problem is intransigence of Big Pharma (and Germany) to waive IP and allow manufacture elsewhere. I well recall pharma saying it would take too long to do this, so no need. But many months have passed, the world is still far behind in getting vaccinated and it is now clear, to me at least, that this is mainly about control of IP and profits. Pfizer wanting to charge for booster shots is about putting profits ahead of wellbeing. The mentality of arms dealers.
It is also pretty clear that the shortage of workers is probably due workers fed up with low pay and being exposed to potentially hazardous situations. Not just exposure to Covid, but by customers who will hurt employees for trying to do their jobs. I have heard a lot about middle managers who are insisting a return to work in offices to maintain their micromanaging behaviors. Naturally, office real estate owners are talking their book saying there is a rush back to offices, and I am sure I have detected planted articles about lost productivity with remote work when the anecdotal experiences of those I talk to reveals the very opposite. I have no doubt that commercial real estate owners who are mortgaged to the hilt are worrying about calls on their loans as happened during the early 1990s recession in California, and again in after the Nasdaq collapse in 2000, and 2008/9.
It would really be nice to see wholesale changes in working conditions and benefits in the US, such as happened after the Black Death in Europe. US workers seem to be generally ignorant of working conditions and benefits in EU countries, wedded to the propaganda that the USA is best in everything and therefore elsewhere must be worse.
Awkward corollary -- that six-to-nine-month immunity window means that for planning purposes, we need to inoculate everyone on earth in three months. Given the storage lifetime of the vaccines, that implies things about the production process we don't have the capacity to achieve without far more investment that a private firm could arrange or will consider. It's not enough to spend public money; it will be necessary to create direct public production.
The plus side is that having built a 15 billion doses/quarter vaccine production infrastructure, there are other uses.