And monetising it.
Oxford vaccine is slightly less effective, but about an order of magnitude more affordable.
Oxford vaccine is slightly less effective, but about an order of magnitude more affordable.
All I'm saying is you should give more credit to companies doing the right thing and essentially giving the vaccine away at cost while there's a pandemic, even if their vaccine isn't quite as good.
I just find it odd that companies like Pfizer and Moderna are about to lift the world out of a catastrophe in unprecedented fashion, and we have people complaining about prices which are not overly high when compared to the benefit, even in the developing world. India's GDP in 2019 was almost 2.9 trillion and the virus has knocked 300 billion or more off that just this year. Even under your extreme example they aren't going to care about spending an "extra" 14 billion.
Without the Oxford one, a lot of countries around the world would still be just as screwed as they are today.
But don’t get me wrong I think what they all have done is amazing. And it makes me happy.
* [Pfizer Vaccine's Price May Be Throwing off Indian Government, Report Says - The Wire Science](https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-vaccines-price-may-...)
Oxford/AstraZeneca: €1.78 (£1.61). Johnson & Johnson: $8.50 (£6.30). Sanofi/GSK: €7.56. Pfizer/BioNTech: €12. CureVac: €10. Moderna: $18.
Compare with the price of 1 liter of hand sanitizer. These vaccines are incredibly affordable.
> RNA vaccines can be produced faster, more cheaply, and in a more standardized fashion
So should be cheaper if anything rather than more expensive.
Could be worth it if mRNA tech becomes the norm for other vaccines.
I am really excited about mRNA vaccine technology. It’s brilliant.
The cheap-slow version costs a million lives, and several billion extra man-months of lockdown, in return for a globally insignificant cost savings. Valuing lives at maybe $1000 each.
Increasing production 10x for 10x the cost is pretty typical of things where you build a lot of special-purpose equipment which is then worthless after the production run.
No-one is saying make it slower for less money. The Oxford vaccine is being rolled out fast, millions of doses available - actually millions more because, since they aren't so concerned with making money, India are able to make their own locally.
This isn't a questions of scale - everyone is doing this at maximum scale. Some are just making more money from it than others. The Moderna one is more expensive because it's for-profit not because they've spent more money scaling up.
If anyone knows otherwise let me know.
No manufactured product has ever been found to have a maximum scale. Many complex products are produced in the billions per month.
The only limit is willingness to invest money to hire more people to build and run more factories in parallel. Those budgets were ultimately set by governments, unwilling to spend a few billion to save millions of lives and avoid trillions in economic damage.