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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Sure it’s private companies but it wasn’t random chance that led to AstraZeneca (a British–Swedish company) working with the Oxford group in the U.K. or Pfizer (an American company) with BioNTech. It’s a lot easier to control production when it happens within your borders (eg Trump did have some executive order banning exports but this was just symbolic when the defence production act was invoked.)

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BioNTech is German and Pfizer is American. Am I missing something?

Pfizer has big factories in the US for making vaccines. How many does BioNTech have in Germany?

They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.

The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...

What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.

Two reasons.

1. Planners are penny-wise, and pound foolish.

2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.

I meant legitimate reasons. If those are the only reasons I'll be expecting significant jail time to be handed out.

Those are legitimate reasons.

Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic.

Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case.

They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now.

I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time.

To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.

Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.

Or your expectations are too high? Like, this has never happened before, we dodged sars, mers and swine flu so absolutely nobody was prepared.

And have you offered to supply your government with all your vast supply chain knowledge? This stuff is complicated, and one link in the chain failing reduces all capacity.

It requires a war effort like mobilisation. I never said it was easy but not even trying is inexcusable.

To be fair, they did try (to a certain extent). The reason that we have as many vaccines as we do is because the US, UK & EU poured money into all of the vaccine efforts.

I'm also super disappointed at the lack of ambition, to be honest (every human should be vaccinated by EOY if we actually want this to be done), but given my experience running much smaller scale logistics, I'm amazed we've done as well as we have.

As I note above, the US Feds could definitely have done better, as could the EU, but there's a sense of deference to private providers which I find unwarranted, and which could be the cause of the slowness.

I also don’t understand why we need to negotiate with the private sector at all. This is a crisis. Set a fair price. Mandate an open license, open up manufacturing to anyone and everyone who can do it and just start doing it. Regarding supply chain difficulties we can also throw money at that. For sure there are people and companies who can solve each individual problem if given the resources. Right now we don’t have the luxury of efficiency we just need to get it done.

I don't know what other countries did but the UK did start doing this.

There was lots of talk about cronyism when Kate Bingham was appointed to run the vaccine task force but taking bets and investing early even when outcomes weren't know is one thing the UK seems to have done well in the last year

https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingh...

BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty).

Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boo...

[2] https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-te...

[3] https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic...

[4] https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partne...

Trump never invoked the Defense Production Act.

But Biden did, right?

Yep

They both did. Trump did it for medical supplies a year earlier:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-...

> President Trump first invoked the DPA in late March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic...limiting the export of medical goods, increasing domestic production of masks and ventilators

https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-bidens-invocation-...

Nothing in there on vaccine export but one would assume it is implied.

It is not I don't think, but I could be wrong.

Yes he did: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/politics/trump-defense-produc...

Trump invoked the DPA for:

* protective equipment and ventilators

* specifically 3M and companies for masks and ventilators

* testing swabs

* diagnostic systems and assays

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https://web.archive.org/web/20200318233011/https://www.white...

> Accordingly, I find that health and medical resources needed to respond to the spread of COVID-19, including personal protective equipment and ventilators, meet the criteria specified in section 101(b) of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4511(b)).

Note that this is the executive order for allowing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to do things...

> (c) The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall issue such orders and adopt and revise appropriate rules and regulations as may be necessary to implement this order.

It wasn't specifically saying "you, company, make this."

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/trump-expands-dpa-o...

> President Donald Trump on Thursday invoked the Defense Production Act to push 3M and six major medical device companies to produce protective masks and ventilators needed for the coronavirus outbreak, bowing to weeks of pressure to expand the federal government’s use of the emergency statute.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/trump-dpa-testing-s...

> President Donald Trump will use the Defense Production Act to compel an unnamed company to produce 20 million more coronavirus testing swabs every month — weeks after labs and public health officials started warning that shortages of these swabs were hurting efforts to ramp up testing nationwide

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https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/08/20/trump-administrati...

> These acquisitions will fulfill a large-volume purchase of diagnostic systems and assays for COVID-19 testing and will expedite shipments of these systems and assays to every nursing home certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services (CMS) with a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) Certificate of Waiver – approximately 14,000 nursing homes – in the United States.

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