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Comment by yzmtf2008 | Hacker News Reader

yzmtf2008

> Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US.

See sibling comment on Moderna.

> The vaccine was practically ready on day 2 of COVID due to mRNA

No. "ready" as in we can produce a vile in a lab? Sure. Ready as in tested in the general population, mass production facilities, distribution networks? Absolutely not.

> So I'm not sure why Warp speed is considered a success?

Producing a vaccine is about the easiest part of warp speed. Having the supply chain needed to vaccinate the whole population in such a brief time? That's the success. Also, it's literally the entire point of TFA.

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If I'm not mistaken the mRNA production is kind of bonkers, it's outsourced to a bestiary of third party small contract manufacturers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that any newly released drug has rolled out like that at such a scale in the past (usually it's one/a few plants all controlled by the big pharma that gets certified by the FDA). It's REALLY impressive that the bureaucracy figured out exactly where to bend the rules and shepherded all of the small contract manufacturers into compliance to get reasonable batch-to-batch consistency and safety for these vaccines.

“The bureaucracy” is doing a lot of work there

THIS is what I want to hear more about. How was all this coordination done? Solving collective action problems is what government is supposed to do… was this a command economy, central planning, or some sort of intiative like we have now with the new “security best practices imperatives” that will use the infrastructure bill and standardize what small vendors will deliver?

I don't necessarily think that government's job is to "solve collective action problems" (there are plenty of alternatives, actually free markets themselves are a solution to the collective action problem of "what should the price of X be") -- but if it's going to doit, it should be held to a high standard of effectiveness.

My impression is that critical points in the process (combining mRNA with lipids) is a rate limiting step and can only be performed by a handful of specialized manufacturing facilities.

Derek Lowes “In the Pipeline” column has a number of articles relating to mRNA vaccine manufacturing:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/more-mrna-vaccine-... https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/myths-vaccine-manu...

Those are interesting! Thanks for sharing

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