I can assure you, under most meanings of the words "uncommon" and "common", microfluidic devices for manufacturing these nanoscale encapsulated mRNAs are definitely "uncommon." In fact, I would wager that there are probably a handful in the world at most. Moreover, it's a fair bet that no two are alike.
Additionally, until this brand new mRNA vaccine technology actually demonstrated efficacy it was not quite so clear cut that we should put a huge proportion of our resources into making more of these devices, rather than explore different vaccine platforms.
They demonstrated high efficacy in primate models only like a month or two after first developed and earlier than that in vitro.
But we're not really limited in resources, here. We have TONS of money, people are unemployed, and this is essentially the biggest problem facing the world right now. We can AND OUGHT TO be "wasting" money by throwing large resources at a wide range of potential vaccines (some of which wouldn't work).
The whole "we don't have resources" thing is absurd. We've been spending literally trillions of dollars on COVID-19 relief (and monetary easing, etc) which is a poor substitute for actually solving the COVID-19 problem.
We did "waste" billions of dollars on a number of possible vaccine candidates that didn't actually pan out. See, Merck and Sanofi and GSK. Primate models are great (best we have), but we didn't "know" these things worked until end of December. It's beginning of Feb. I know the world is on fire, but things are moving fairly quickly. 1.34 million vaccinations a day in the U.S., from zero at beginning of Dec. That's pretty good. With much luck, the plateau in the vaccination rate this week gets resolved and we manage to hit 2M/day by end of Feb.
Economists clearly articulated last year that governments should buy capacity, not doses directly. Because that just pushes prices up (and we see the conflicts about fulfilling orders).
Furthermore. Since the process of vaccine development and manufacturing is closed, done in the shadows, no one had any idea where the bottleneck will be. (Yes, some companies bet on their vaccine and started expansion while the development was ongoing. And Derek speculates that the supply chain is at full capacity, but ... we don't know, and again, we could have been expanding that too exactly since a year ago.)
The mRNA LPN packaging might be new, but manufacturing plasmids that churn out Adeno Associated Virus particles with the correct payload is so old tech random youtube dude did it in 2018 February.
For example Trump simply went with ordering only 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and said meh when asked about whether maybe in a country of 300+ million people they might happen to ... need a few extra ones.
The EU negotiated so hard that even though it ordered 400M from AstraZeneca, somehow they find it more important to fulfill other orders first.
It's too little too late. I understand that Bill Gates [0] can be so blasé easily, as for him it's just more of the same. Plus he has predicted it, he was directly trying to do something against these global health problems for at least a decade now. But this "inefficiency" - that thousands of people die of each day - is mind boggingly infuriating.
> Additionally, until this brand new mRNA vaccine technology actually demonstrated efficacy it was not quite so clear cut that we should put a huge proportion of our resources into making more of these devices, rather than explore different vaccine platforms.
I can't believe this is true.
The Pfizer and Modern vaccines were clearly in the top 10 last March and April. How could you argue that given 10 months and a billion dollars each we couldn't double our microfluidic device capacity for these two vaccines.
You are citing phase I data to support an implication that "clearly" phase 3 data was going to be positive. That is not how it works in real life. Many many many drug candidates look great after phase 1 and fail to become approved drugs.
Also, we did double our microfluidic device capacity. We more than doubled it. We increased our capacity by something like a million fold. Before these vaccines (first of their kind), there was no commercial scale capacity. This has all been invented in the last year. There was even a chance that achieving such capacity would not be possible. It is fairly common that drug candidates that look promising in phase 1 or 2 simply cannot be manufactured at scale with the quality required to ensure consistent safety and efficacy.
That’s true about many drug candidates but not these. Moderna (and Pfizer) had EXTREMELY promising results from in vitro, primate, Phase I, and Phase II results. Success by Phase III was very, very likely.
I agree that the new drug candidates had promising results. Yet as a new technology, there was still a risk. For example, the first Pfizer drug candidate BNT162b1 gave fever to 75% of the participants in some cases [0]. Some countries decided not to buy from them at first for that reason.
To add to that, except for Pfizer, all the other 5 vaccine contenders chosen by the Operation Warp Speed (Moderna, J&J, Oxford-AZ, Merk, Sanofi-GSK) received money to expedite their manufacturing regardless of the vaccine being successful of not. Together they received $11 BN. What can they show for that? Excuses about microfluidics? And vials ? (did you hear the one that Moderna will start putting 15 doses in vials intended for 10, because it turn out that vials are a bottleneck too after all). They couldn't figure out the vial thing in 10 months?
Additionally, until this brand new mRNA vaccine technology actually demonstrated efficacy it was not quite so clear cut that we should put a huge proportion of our resources into making more of these devices, rather than explore different vaccine platforms.