How Pfizer delivered a Covid vaccine in record time
It&#x27;s interesting there wasn&#x27;t direct economic injection from governments.<p>Both the humanitarian and economic toll of COVID is off the charts. 20% contraction in the economy, is like 4 <i>Trillion</i> in GDP loss for the US alone, maybe 20 <i>Trillion</i> for the world.<p>And that&#x27;s just the money, not the human loss.<p>Given that, I don&#x27;t get why nations didn&#x27;t give them basically blank cheques, enabled the socialization&#x2F;commandeering of factories and equipment, 5-10% of the Armed Forces for whatever needs etc..<p>Literally every drug company can &#x27;report their assets&#x27; to the COVID task force and they will get deployed as needed. The companies will be happy to do that because they&#x27;ll earn 3-10x return on those assets otherwise anyhow.<p>That seems a little dramatic but it&#x27;s basically nothing compared to the damage COVID is causing.<p>Also: they didn&#x27;t go into the actual manufacturing details to much, sadly.<p>Edit: also interesting would be the sunk cost &#x2F; opportunity cost calculation on ramping up production of untested vaccines.<p>If opportunity cost didn&#x27;t factor in i.e. if ramping up one vaccine didn&#x27;t come at the cost of another, my bet is that it would have been worth any price.<p>If the US had spent $2B on ramping up every vaccine candidate before they were approved, and only 1 out of 10 came through, costing $20B for the first massive batch and accelerating subsequent batches, instead of merely $2B - would it have been worth it?<p>$200 a dose instead of $20 dose?<p>The math would say it&#x27;s way beyond worth it. There&#x27;s a case for &#x27;prepping&#x27; every single vaccine candidate to the extent it&#x27;s possible and even starting to manufacture in quantities way ahead of time.<p>This financial calculus doesn&#x27;t work in the context of Pfizer - it doesn&#x27;t make sense for them - however it absolutely does in the bigger picture.<p>A &#x27;remedy&#x27; for this could have been to offer Pfizer massively increased price per dose for earlier delivery, in which case it would have made sense for the to spend $20B instead of $2, or simply some kind of national &#x27;blank cheque&#x27; intervention. The former concept is neat but would be hard to nail down, the later is probably more workable.<p>Given that vaccine manufacture is 1&#x2F;2 the equation, not just the R&amp;D, I hope the &#x27;after action reports&#x27; will put this in context.