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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

The point of OWS wasn't to fund the vaccine that was going to have the best effects. The point was to fund production of N different vaccines before the efficacy results came in, so one would be ready if it was efficacious, because the potential time saved was worth the extra expense even if the backup vaccine failed. If it was the best that is pure coincidence.

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Or to put in terms HN'ers are more likely to be familiar with: OWS was a wide-scale speculative execution exercise.

Run everything in parallel, or at least start as early as possible, and be willing to discard the results of potentially dozens of paths that did not lead to an acceptable solution.

Programs can have effects that aren’t intended. My point is that the scattershot funding approach did result in the most efficacious vaccine, moreso than alternative more limited (for various reasons) funding efforts. I’m not so sure data exists to say that was a coincidence. The weakness IMO is that the funding and cooperation wasn’t even more broad, including the WHO and other international organizations, but that makes sense giving the political climate at the time.

There were other vaccine development efforts in Germany besides BioNTech too, most notably CureVac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CureVac#Reports_of_Trump_admin...), which made headlines early on in the pandemic because it was rumored that the Trump administration tried to get exclusive or prioritary rights to its vaccine for the US. Guess Trump is now glad he didn't go through with that, because the vaccine came very late and had disappointing efficacy numbers...

In fact the mRNA vaccines that are current heroes were way down on the list of ones anyone expected to work. They had only a small amount of experience compared to other ways to make a vaccine that had been used for years. However we made a big bet on them. Sort of like going to the casino and betting on every number at the same time just to say you were a winner.. very inefficient use of money, but the goal of winning was important.

Operation Warp Speed gave equally huge sums of money for each of: mRNA vaccines, adenovirus vector vaccines, and the more traditional protein adjuvant vaccines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...

Adenovirus vector vaccines are also very new technology: First one was approved only in 2019, an ebola vaccine.

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