really interesting thread that raises a lot of questions and issues:
1) early on, bill gates got a lot of attention and praise (including from me) for promising to fund factory construction of candidate vaccines to accelerate production. he did so, and this seems to have been useful in getting india's production of the astrazeneca vaccine on line. but, it doesn't seem to have been critical or even to have meaningfully changed production speed. other vaccine makers and other regions just as quickly put together production capacity from purely commericial ventures as soon as govts stepped in to guarantee a market.
2) the whole multi-party effort was just an amazing success and it's miraculous how rapidly vaccines weren't just invented, but put into production at scale. absolutely amazing. but, following the initial success, there seem to be some less optimized parts of the follow through. notably, resources initially put towards ultimately less successful vaccines don't seem to have been shifted towards the more successful vaccines. there seems to be some significant fraction of global capacity unused because it's contracted to produce not yet viable, or less useful, vaccines.
3) even aside from the above issue, the amazing initial effort to get vaccines into mass production does not seem to have been followed up with an equivalent effort to get them into ridiculous mass production. why has there not been either the demand or the ability to continue accelerating production to vaccinate the world by, say, the end of 2021 instead of the end of 2022?
https://twitter.com/ChadBown/status/1422890817618915331
