6 ms·

Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines

210 points by palcu 6y ago

satya71 6y ago
I have been trying to find out why the supply of mRNA is limited. This article gives me hope that it can be scaled up with the right focus. As long as there is no fundamental science to be discovered, industrial processes can be scaled with enough money. It is not possible to grow chicken eggs faster. So it's been impossible to have anything less than a years lead time to get flu vaccines made in sufficient quantities. Planet money even did a show on the emergency chickens [1] (have they been called into service already ?). So we have the chickens, but no COVID vaccine that can be grown in eggs. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-the-market-for-emergency-vaccines-is-like-no-other https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th...
- CodeMage 6y ago
  I know we're not supposed to discuss downvotes, but can anyone explain why this is downvoted so much? I want to know if there's some kind of misinformation here that I missed, so I'll spot it in the future.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    There's a couple innocuous comments here that are downvoted for no discerable reason. Weird.
  - slumdev 6y ago
    It's probably the mention of chicken eggs. Some vaccines are grown in HEK 293 cells. HEK 293 is a cell line taken from an aborted fetus. (HEK -> Human Embryonic Kidney). Many people consider vaccines grown in HEK 293 to be immoral. Chicken eggs are a moral alternative medium. It doesn't necessarily apply in this case because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was only tested on HEK 293, not grown in it. (Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293.) Some people still consider the testing to be immoral. Some don't.
    - johncalvinyoung 6y ago
      Source on Moderna's vaccine being grown in HEK 293? The things I've read stated otherwise, such as this handout from North Dakota's health department: https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20Vaccine%20Page/COVID-19%20Vaccine%20Fetal%20Cell%20Handout.pdf https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20...
    - flobosg 6y ago
      > Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293 Do you have a link to confirm that? I thought that Pfizer/BioNTech as well as Moderna used HEK cells solely for testing.
    - yosito 6y ago
      > Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293. This is false. Moderna's vaccine is synthesized, not grown.
    - fabian2k 6y ago
      All mRNA vaccines are produced by in vitro transcription, that uses enzymes but involved no cells or any cell cultures like HEK 293.
    - mprovost 6y ago
      It's true that some people consider it to be immoral but the Vatican has said that it's morally acceptable given the current circumstances and lack of alternatives. [0] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55409693 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55409693
bawolff 6y ago
"The Moderna vaccine is also known as “mRNA-1273”, but appears to lack a brand name other than “Moderna COVID-19 vaccine” which is what it says on the product label" Anyone else find that really refreshing?
- exabrial 6y ago
  ...Heartbleed, Spectre, Meltdown... VaxMod? I have no ideas :(
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Having a name for a big CVE is actually quite a good idea because it's much easier to string a narrative together around it to convince people to take it seriously. Spectre is better than something like "Novel data exfiltration from branch prediction using a cache side-channel, variant 3" or similar.
    - exabrial 6y ago
      Haha totally agree. Much like vaccine nomenclature.
- vmception 6y ago
  that's because Moderna is the brand, this is their first product and they plan to launch other vaccines under that brand they'll probably conform to the drugs themselves having brand names eventually like the rest of the industry
- refurb 6y ago
  It’s not surprising. Desperate need for a vaccine and not enough supply means you don’t really need branding. No doubt it will be branded once Covid is under control.
linuxftw 6y ago
Interesting bits about the 'bottleneck' being the lipid envelope. This sounds highly proprietary and very, very new (eg, not widely tested). How can these products be QA'd by an independent lab to be free from significant defects? Are the doses being distributed produced on the same line with the same procedure as the doses in the trials?
- nojito 6y ago
  People have been taking the vaccine for almost a year now. The idea that there are significant side effects that have failed to surface makes zero sense.
  - postalrat 6y ago
    Because some side effects like cancer may take a while to manifest.
    - tzs 6y ago
      Don't almost all chemical carcinogens basically raise the probability you will get cancer while the carcinogen is present in you, with higher concentrations raising the probability more? And so your cancer chances are roughly the integral over time of the concentration of the carcinogen within you? For either of these vaccines even if some part of the delivery/packaging mechanism, such as the lipid enclosure, is carcinogenic, you are only getting a small amount and only getting two short exposures. It seems like that would make the cancer rate from them so low as to be almost impossible to detect.
      - toast0 6y ago
        As you said, the exposure amount is quite low, so barring something really toxic, I wouldn't expect a danger from chemical reactions. However, the body is a complex system; if something in the vaccine triggers a change in function, that could lead to side effects that are only detected years later; most likely through epidemiologic studies comparing those who got the different types of vaccines with those who didn't. Of course, the disease itself has potential long term effects as well; and has already been studied to have significant medium term effects.
rediguanayum 6y ago
Fantastic write up on the supply chain which is the overlooked challenge to these vaccines. I'll need to reread it (and again). Also good are the "In the pipeline" blog posts by Derek Lowe in Sciencemag about vaccine development: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
MichaelRazum 6y ago
Wow amazing article. Thanks a lot. Interesting to see that most of the technology comes from Europe and US. Also interesting to see that it is complete independent from Asia.
hef19898 6y ago
This is one of the best supply chain articles I ever read. Cudos! As the article is mainly describing the supply chain, I'd like to add some of the challenges, especially downstream / last mile. The Biontech vaccine seems to be a royal pain to distribute. Cold chains are tricky to maintain, let alone at -70 C. Having doses packed in numbers larger than one makes it challenging to vaccinate people at the centers, the unfreezing takes some time, and the vaccine cannot be stored eternally once unfrozen. So you have to closely schedule appointments with the treatment of the vaccine itself for batches of people. Which cannot be allowed to wait in line because of COVID-19. It also means that existing infrastructure, doctors and care and nursing services, cannot be used to get the Biontech vaccine to the people. Yet another pain. At yet, we are only discussing the purchased doses. Not even the delivery schedules, just the total quantity. As if that was the real bottle neck right now.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  That’s the wicked nature of this disease at this point in time. It’s almost like it evolved to exploit the lunacy of modern society. The politicians are busy blaming each other, and the news people are busy looking for bullshit scoops.
  - jcims 6y ago
    >It’s almost like it evolved to exploit the lunacy of modern society. I think you're actually correct. If the lunacy of modern society helped it succeed vs genetically similar organisms I would call that a successful adaptation.
- Animats 6y ago
  What we have now is the minimum viable product. The convenience features come later. If it weren't urgent, the MVP wouldn't have been shipped. There are vaccines that are more shelf-stable in development. Merck is working on a pill version. All those features add to development time. The whole clinical testing process has to be re-run for each modification to the delivery chemistry. A year or two downstream, there will be plenty of supply, competing vendors, fewer side effects, and greater ease of use. But we need something now, so the working prototype had to be manufactured.
kart23 6y ago
Like many others, I find the LNPs to be the most interesting part. It seems like Moderna was having issues with accumulation and toxicity issues, but changed something to make it safely degrade in the body. [0] Heres an interesting paper that shows some of the challenges. [1] 99% of it went over my head, but I still find the research intriguing. [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/can-multibillion-dollar-biotech-prove-its-rna-drugs-are-safe-rare-disease https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/can-multibillion-dol... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7329694/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7329694/
- rev0lutions 6y ago
  I used to work there til 2016, can confirm the immune responses were most lethal in pre-clinical trials
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
at_a_remove 6y ago
Here's something I can only speculate on with the cold chain. I have mentioned it elsewhere on HN, but I've handle dry ice and liquid nitrogen quite a bit, first in college and then just later for fun. Several years back, I noticed a very large price hike in dry ice, as well as a drop in availability (less available in my city, vanishing from small towns). I was told by someone in my supply chain that federal regulations around dry ice had changed, resulting in only a few players being left in the game and of course the price going up. I wonder if now, a decade or so later, the law of unindented consequences has reared its often invisible head.
- jonemo 6y ago
  Hi, author of the article here. If you can remember or find any additional details about this, I would be curious to learn more about it. I admittedly didn't research the dry ice section too deeply because it is so ubiquitous. This NPR All Things Considered clip made me wonder if dry ice might be more complicated than I thought: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/950102003/does-u-s-have-enough-dry-ice-for-covid-19-vaccine-distribution https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/950102003/does-u-s-have-enoug... Note how the interviewee's business is located in Miami but the dry ice comes from Georgia. Surely a populous state like Florida has local dry ice production? Also, fun fact: "[Fearing a dry ice shortage,] the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association sent a letter to state and federal officials asking that 350,000 pounds of dry ice a week be set aside." Source: https://www.cbs58.com/news/cheese-industry-threatened-by-covid-dry-ice-demand https://www.cbs58.com/news/cheese-industry-threatened-by-cov...
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    If I had to take a stab, I would say 2008, but I could be wrong. I'd have to see if I could get into some "still closed to the public" places to ask for more specifics and go from there, because this was less than a minute of conversation over a decade back. You're right in that it was once ubiquitous but it has grown steadily less so.
- hef19898 6y ago
  That looks an US thing, I got 50kg of dry ice for close to nothing from a small local outlet last year just to remove some rust and old paint. At scale it might be different so, 50kg are nowhere near enough.
wegs 6y ago
> Next to it is a picture of a CodexDNA BioXP device that is advertised as producing “custom DNA fragments of up to 7,000 base pairs”. Could this be the next distributed manufacturing revolution? This time with DNA printers making COVID-19 vaccines in our garages instead of 3D printers and plastic widgets? > I’ll start with the bad news: Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon. ... We're not there in time for COVID19, but technologically, I think we're less far away than this article presumes. Cost of both sequencing and synthesis has been dropping like a rock, albeit not very smoothly. I can get DNA synthesized for less than what I was paying for amateur PCBs as an undergrad. A lot of the other complexity, I suspect, is specific to getting this out in <1 year. It's worth remembering the earliest vaccines took no technology beyond what I have in my garage. With a little more time and patience, I'm sure some of the other complexity will go down. We can't spare time and patience when we're bleeding billions of dollars from our economy and thousands of lives each day, but....
- yosito 6y ago
  > Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon. There was actually a video on YouTube a few months ago about some biohackers, Josiah Zayner and others, who made a DNA COVID vaccine in their garages, and it actually worked. Granted it wasn't mRNA, but very similar.
GuB-42 6y ago
The most mind boggling fact for me is that glass vials are a bottleneck. We have all these high tech stuff, $50k a gram chemicals, custom built machines, DNA printers and nano-scale technologies producing a substance where every atom is at the right place. And all that is produced at a scale where we are limited by glass vials. That's literally ancient technology, and commodity stuff. Ok, it is a bit fancier than what the Romans had, but these are still just glass bottles. The glass vial part is expected, things get complicated when multiplied by a billion, but it gives a sense of how much vaccine is being produced and how fast it is done.
- iSnow 6y ago
  But the blog post states that preloaded syringes are the bottleneck and that's why they are using glass vials?
vimy 6y ago
I remember at the start of the pandemic Bill Gates was funding mass production of, I'm not sure but I believe 8, several vaccines before trials were completed. The idea was that there wouldn't be a delay between testing and having enough doses for everyone. He said some of the vaccines would fail their trials and the money would be wasted but he said it was worth it to kickstart production. I wonder if it made a difference? Does anyone know more how his plan turned out?
- mynegation 6y ago
  Was he actually funding building the plants or advocated for it? My impression was - it is the latter.
  - peytn 6y ago
    I was surprised to learn he backtracked and said he was “exploring” the idea. Curious if anybody has a more recent update. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/9/21210250/coronavirus-billionaires-jack-dorsey-jeff-bezos-bill-gates https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/9/21210250/coronavirus-bil... He certainly put money towards COVID, but it’s unclear to me if the factory building idea went anywhere.
cheese_van 6y ago
The research cooperation by the scientific community seems unprecedented. The Bomb had terrific focus as did the Apollo program. But those were proprietary for the most part, not a world-wide effort. This seems new. It would be grand if this spirit continues and provides a model for the other sciences. I would like to think this is a potential silver lining that could have wonderful consequences.
dirtyid 6y ago
Question, which vaccine to choose given option. Moderna has 100mg per dose and standard freezer storage Pfizer has 30mg per dose and extreme cold chain storage. Seems like there's more potential for Pfizer to spoil along logistics chain.
- iSnow 6y ago
  The shipping boxes are temperature monitored the whole time as mentioned in the article. After thawing, the vials are valid for ~5d. I don't see a bigger chance they spoil. I doubt I get to choose, but if, I would take one of the mRNA/LNP vaccines.
8thcross 6y ago
most interesting post in a while.

210 points by palcu 6y ago

I have been trying to find out why the supply of mRNA is limited. This article gives me hope that it can be scaled up with the right focus. As long as there is no fundamental science to be discovered, industrial processes can be scaled with enough money. It is not possible to grow chicken eggs faster. So it's been impossible to have anything less than a years lead time to get flu vaccines made in sufficient quantities. Planet money even did a show on the emergency chickens [1] (have they been called into service already ?). So we have the chickens, but no COVID vaccine that can be grown in eggs. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-the-market-for-emergency-vaccines-is-like-no-other https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th...

CodeMage 6y ago
I know we're not supposed to discuss downvotes, but can anyone explain why this is downvoted so much? I want to know if there's some kind of misinformation here that I missed, so I'll spot it in the future.
- icelancer 6y ago
  There's a couple innocuous comments here that are downvoted for no discerable reason. Weird.
- slumdev 6y ago
  It's probably the mention of chicken eggs. Some vaccines are grown in HEK 293 cells. HEK 293 is a cell line taken from an aborted fetus. (HEK -> Human Embryonic Kidney). Many people consider vaccines grown in HEK 293 to be immoral. Chicken eggs are a moral alternative medium. It doesn't necessarily apply in this case because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was only tested on HEK 293, not grown in it. (Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293.) Some people still consider the testing to be immoral. Some don't.
  - johncalvinyoung 6y ago
    Source on Moderna's vaccine being grown in HEK 293? The things I've read stated otherwise, such as this handout from North Dakota's health department: https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20Vaccine%20Page/COVID-19%20Vaccine%20Fetal%20Cell%20Handout.pdf https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20...
  - flobosg 6y ago
    > Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293 Do you have a link to confirm that? I thought that Pfizer/BioNTech as well as Moderna used HEK cells solely for testing.
  - yosito 6y ago
    > Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293. This is false. Moderna's vaccine is synthesized, not grown.
  - fabian2k 6y ago
    All mRNA vaccines are produced by in vitro transcription, that uses enzymes but involved no cells or any cell cultures like HEK 293.
  - mprovost 6y ago
    It's true that some people consider it to be immoral but the Vatican has said that it's morally acceptable given the current circumstances and lack of alternatives. [0] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55409693 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55409693

bawolff 6y ago

"The Moderna vaccine is also known as “mRNA-1273”, but appears to lack a brand name other than “Moderna COVID-19 vaccine” which is what it says on the product label" Anyone else find that really refreshing?

exabrial 6y ago
...Heartbleed, Spectre, Meltdown... VaxMod? I have no ideas :(
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Having a name for a big CVE is actually quite a good idea because it's much easier to string a narrative together around it to convince people to take it seriously. Spectre is better than something like "Novel data exfiltration from branch prediction using a cache side-channel, variant 3" or similar.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    Haha totally agree. Much like vaccine nomenclature.
vmception 6y ago
that's because Moderna is the brand, this is their first product and they plan to launch other vaccines under that brand they'll probably conform to the drugs themselves having brand names eventually like the rest of the industry
refurb 6y ago
It’s not surprising. Desperate need for a vaccine and not enough supply means you don’t really need branding. No doubt it will be branded once Covid is under control.

linuxftw 6y ago

Interesting bits about the 'bottleneck' being the lipid envelope. This sounds highly proprietary and very, very new (eg, not widely tested). How can these products be QA'd by an independent lab to be free from significant defects? Are the doses being distributed produced on the same line with the same procedure as the doses in the trials?

nojito 6y ago
People have been taking the vaccine for almost a year now. The idea that there are significant side effects that have failed to surface makes zero sense.
- postalrat 6y ago
  Because some side effects like cancer may take a while to manifest.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Don't almost all chemical carcinogens basically raise the probability you will get cancer while the carcinogen is present in you, with higher concentrations raising the probability more? And so your cancer chances are roughly the integral over time of the concentration of the carcinogen within you? For either of these vaccines even if some part of the delivery/packaging mechanism, such as the lipid enclosure, is carcinogenic, you are only getting a small amount and only getting two short exposures. It seems like that would make the cancer rate from them so low as to be almost impossible to detect.
    - toast0 6y ago
      As you said, the exposure amount is quite low, so barring something really toxic, I wouldn't expect a danger from chemical reactions. However, the body is a complex system; if something in the vaccine triggers a change in function, that could lead to side effects that are only detected years later; most likely through epidemiologic studies comparing those who got the different types of vaccines with those who didn't. Of course, the disease itself has potential long term effects as well; and has already been studied to have significant medium term effects.

rediguanayum 6y ago

Fantastic write up on the supply chain which is the overlooked challenge to these vaccines. I'll need to reread it (and again). Also good are the "In the pipeline" blog posts by Derek Lowe in Sciencemag about vaccine development: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/

MichaelRazum 6y ago

Wow amazing article. Thanks a lot. Interesting to see that most of the technology comes from Europe and US. Also interesting to see that it is complete independent from Asia.

hef19898 6y ago

This is one of the best supply chain articles I ever read. Cudos! As the article is mainly describing the supply chain, I'd like to add some of the challenges, especially downstream / last mile. The Biontech vaccine seems to be a royal pain to distribute. Cold chains are tricky to maintain, let alone at -70 C. Having doses packed in numbers larger than one makes it challenging to vaccinate people at the centers, the unfreezing takes some time, and the vaccine cannot be stored eternally once unfrozen. So you have to closely schedule appointments with the treatment of the vaccine itself for batches of people. Which cannot be allowed to wait in line because of COVID-19. It also means that existing infrastructure, doctors and care and nursing services, cannot be used to get the Biontech vaccine to the people. Yet another pain. At yet, we are only discussing the purchased doses. Not even the delivery schedules, just the total quantity. As if that was the real bottle neck right now.

Spooky23 6y ago
That’s the wicked nature of this disease at this point in time. It’s almost like it evolved to exploit the lunacy of modern society. The politicians are busy blaming each other, and the news people are busy looking for bullshit scoops.
- jcims 6y ago
  >It’s almost like it evolved to exploit the lunacy of modern society. I think you're actually correct. If the lunacy of modern society helped it succeed vs genetically similar organisms I would call that a successful adaptation.
Animats 6y ago
What we have now is the minimum viable product. The convenience features come later. If it weren't urgent, the MVP wouldn't have been shipped. There are vaccines that are more shelf-stable in development. Merck is working on a pill version. All those features add to development time. The whole clinical testing process has to be re-run for each modification to the delivery chemistry. A year or two downstream, there will be plenty of supply, competing vendors, fewer side effects, and greater ease of use. But we need something now, so the working prototype had to be manufactured.

kart23 6y ago

Like many others, I find the LNPs to be the most interesting part. It seems like Moderna was having issues with accumulation and toxicity issues, but changed something to make it safely degrade in the body. [0] Heres an interesting paper that shows some of the challenges. [1] 99% of it went over my head, but I still find the research intriguing. [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/can-multibillion-dollar-biotech-prove-its-rna-drugs-are-safe-rare-disease https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/can-multibillion-dol... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7329694/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7329694/

rev0lutions 6y ago
I used to work there til 2016, can confirm the immune responses were most lethal in pre-clinical trials

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

at_a_remove 6y ago

Here's something I can only speculate on with the cold chain. I have mentioned it elsewhere on HN, but I've handle dry ice and liquid nitrogen quite a bit, first in college and then just later for fun. Several years back, I noticed a very large price hike in dry ice, as well as a drop in availability (less available in my city, vanishing from small towns). I was told by someone in my supply chain that federal regulations around dry ice had changed, resulting in only a few players being left in the game and of course the price going up. I wonder if now, a decade or so later, the law of unindented consequences has reared its often invisible head.

jonemo 6y ago
Hi, author of the article here. If you can remember or find any additional details about this, I would be curious to learn more about it. I admittedly didn't research the dry ice section too deeply because it is so ubiquitous. This NPR All Things Considered clip made me wonder if dry ice might be more complicated than I thought: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/950102003/does-u-s-have-enough-dry-ice-for-covid-19-vaccine-distribution https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/950102003/does-u-s-have-enoug... Note how the interviewee's business is located in Miami but the dry ice comes from Georgia. Surely a populous state like Florida has local dry ice production? Also, fun fact: "[Fearing a dry ice shortage,] the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association sent a letter to state and federal officials asking that 350,000 pounds of dry ice a week be set aside." Source: https://www.cbs58.com/news/cheese-industry-threatened-by-covid-dry-ice-demand https://www.cbs58.com/news/cheese-industry-threatened-by-cov...
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  If I had to take a stab, I would say 2008, but I could be wrong. I'd have to see if I could get into some "still closed to the public" places to ask for more specifics and go from there, because this was less than a minute of conversation over a decade back. You're right in that it was once ubiquitous but it has grown steadily less so.
hef19898 6y ago
That looks an US thing, I got 50kg of dry ice for close to nothing from a small local outlet last year just to remove some rust and old paint. At scale it might be different so, 50kg are nowhere near enough.

wegs 6y ago

> Next to it is a picture of a CodexDNA BioXP device that is advertised as producing “custom DNA fragments of up to 7,000 base pairs”. Could this be the next distributed manufacturing revolution? This time with DNA printers making COVID-19 vaccines in our garages instead of 3D printers and plastic widgets? > I’ll start with the bad news: Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon. ... We're not there in time for COVID19, but technologically, I think we're less far away than this article presumes. Cost of both sequencing and synthesis has been dropping like a rock, albeit not very smoothly. I can get DNA synthesized for less than what I was paying for amateur PCBs as an undergrad. A lot of the other complexity, I suspect, is specific to getting this out in <1 year. It's worth remembering the earliest vaccines took no technology beyond what I have in my garage. With a little more time and patience, I'm sure some of the other complexity will go down. We can't spare time and patience when we're bleeding billions of dollars from our economy and thousands of lives each day, but....

yosito 6y ago
> Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon. There was actually a video on YouTube a few months ago about some biohackers, Josiah Zayner and others, who made a DNA COVID vaccine in their garages, and it actually worked. Granted it wasn't mRNA, but very similar.

GuB-42 6y ago

The most mind boggling fact for me is that glass vials are a bottleneck. We have all these high tech stuff, $50k a gram chemicals, custom built machines, DNA printers and nano-scale technologies producing a substance where every atom is at the right place. And all that is produced at a scale where we are limited by glass vials. That's literally ancient technology, and commodity stuff. Ok, it is a bit fancier than what the Romans had, but these are still just glass bottles. The glass vial part is expected, things get complicated when multiplied by a billion, but it gives a sense of how much vaccine is being produced and how fast it is done.

iSnow 6y ago
But the blog post states that preloaded syringes are the bottleneck and that's why they are using glass vials?

vimy 6y ago

I remember at the start of the pandemic Bill Gates was funding mass production of, I'm not sure but I believe 8, several vaccines before trials were completed. The idea was that there wouldn't be a delay between testing and having enough doses for everyone. He said some of the vaccines would fail their trials and the money would be wasted but he said it was worth it to kickstart production. I wonder if it made a difference? Does anyone know more how his plan turned out?

mynegation 6y ago
Was he actually funding building the plants or advocated for it? My impression was - it is the latter.
- peytn 6y ago
  I was surprised to learn he backtracked and said he was “exploring” the idea. Curious if anybody has a more recent update. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/9/21210250/coronavirus-billionaires-jack-dorsey-jeff-bezos-bill-gates https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/9/21210250/coronavirus-bil... He certainly put money towards COVID, but it’s unclear to me if the factory building idea went anywhere.

cheese_van 6y ago

The research cooperation by the scientific community seems unprecedented. The Bomb had terrific focus as did the Apollo program. But those were proprietary for the most part, not a world-wide effort. This seems new. It would be grand if this spirit continues and provides a model for the other sciences. I would like to think this is a potential silver lining that could have wonderful consequences.

dirtyid 6y ago

Question, which vaccine to choose given option. Moderna has 100mg per dose and standard freezer storage Pfizer has 30mg per dose and extreme cold chain storage. Seems like there's more potential for Pfizer to spoil along logistics chain.

iSnow 6y ago
The shipping boxes are temperature monitored the whole time as mentioned in the article. After thawing, the vials are valid for ~5d. I don't see a bigger chance they spoil. I doubt I get to choose, but if, I would take one of the mRNA/LNP vaccines.

8thcross 6y ago

most interesting post in a while.