Vaccine production is, as far as I can tell, not exponentially increasing over time. I don’t have data on the world as a whole but in the UK at least vaccinations-per-day isn’t even increasing, it’s holding steady!
This is not what you would expect to see if vaccine production was a priority, if it was being increased as fast and as much as possible, cost be damned. If that’s what was happening we should see exponential growth in vaccine production.
The pattern of production we see (steady or slowly increasing) is what we would expect to see if cost was a major constraint for vaccine production, and in particular, if vaccine producers have high fixed costs (the factories, equipment, etc) that they are trying to amortize over many months of production. Better to run one factory for ten months than ten factories for one month, since the latter plan costs almost 10x as much.
I’ve heard that vaccine producers can’t charge high prices and instead have to sell at low prices negotiated by governments that ban them from selling to anyone else. If that’s true, then that also fits nicely with this theory of what’s going on.
So, is this not what’s going on? I’m curious to hear counterarguments.
You are right that some vaccine patent-holding companies are selling at cost. I don’t know if that means that vaccine producers are manufacturing them at cost. Companies like Pfizer don’t necessarily do all their vaccine production in-house. They contract it out.
Operation Warp Speed planned 300 million doses by January 2021, but fell short. According to Airfinity data, 413 million doses have been produced worldwide as of the beginning of March. If these companies’ plans bear out, we’ll have 9 billion doses by year’s end. That looks like exponential growth (or probably sigmoidal) to me.
The key thing to remember here is that vaccine production is not the same as vaccination.
By the Crawford Standard, it’s not enough to find a piece of supporting evidence (i.e. vaccination rates) for a claim that the fundamental bottleneck for faster production (i.e. cost) has been identified. You have a hard job to do. You need to conclusively demonstrate that there are no other factors that might be major bottlenecks. Unless you’ve looked in detail at the economic and logistical challenges of building more factories and manufacturing more vaccines, you can’t rule that out as a major bottleneck.
I didn’t mean to suggest they were manufacturing at cost; quite the opposite! I was saying they weren’t going as fast as they possibly could, e.g. as fast as they would go if they were being paid $10K per vaccine −50% for each month of delay.
Thanks for the data point about doses manufactured so far; that does indeed look like they are ramping up production, though idk if it’s exponential, I’d want to see a graph. This is good evidence against my theory.
If production were exponential but administration were exponential-then-linear then there should be massive stockpiles of unused vaccines by now. Are there?
Vaccine production is, as far as I can tell, not exponentially increasing over time. I don’t have data on the world as a whole but in the UK at least vaccinations-per-day isn’t even increasing, it’s holding steady!
This is not what you would expect to see if vaccine production was a priority, if it was being increased as fast and as much as possible, cost be damned. If that’s what was happening we should see exponential growth in vaccine production.
The pattern of production we see (steady or slowly increasing) is what we would expect to see if cost was a major constraint for vaccine production, and in particular, if vaccine producers have high fixed costs (the factories, equipment, etc) that they are trying to amortize over many months of production. Better to run one factory for ten months than ten factories for one month, since the latter plan costs almost 10x as much.
I’ve heard that vaccine producers can’t charge high prices and instead have to sell at low prices negotiated by governments that ban them from selling to anyone else. If that’s true, then that also fits nicely with this theory of what’s going on.
So, is this not what’s going on? I’m curious to hear counterarguments.
You are right that some vaccine patent-holding companies are selling at cost. I don’t know if that means that vaccine producers are manufacturing them at cost. Companies like Pfizer don’t necessarily do all their vaccine production in-house. They contract it out.
Operation Warp Speed planned 300 million doses by January 2021, but fell short. According to Airfinity data, 413 million doses have been produced worldwide as of the beginning of March. If these companies’ plans bear out, we’ll have 9 billion doses by year’s end. That looks like exponential growth (or probably sigmoidal) to me.
The key thing to remember here is that vaccine production is not the same as vaccination.
By the Crawford Standard, it’s not enough to find a piece of supporting evidence (i.e. vaccination rates) for a claim that the fundamental bottleneck for faster production (i.e. cost) has been identified. You have a hard job to do. You need to conclusively demonstrate that there are no other factors that might be major bottlenecks. Unless you’ve looked in detail at the economic and logistical challenges of building more factories and manufacturing more vaccines, you can’t rule that out as a major bottleneck.
I didn’t mean to suggest they were manufacturing at cost; quite the opposite! I was saying they weren’t going as fast as they possibly could, e.g. as fast as they would go if they were being paid $10K per vaccine −50% for each month of delay.
Thanks for the data point about doses manufactured so far; that does indeed look like they are ramping up production, though idk if it’s exponential, I’d want to see a graph. This is good evidence against my theory.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html is a graph of vaccine doses administered worldwide. It looks like in the beginning there was exponential growth and now there’s linear growth.
Right, but again, I’m talking in the OP about production, not administration.
If production were exponential but administration were exponential-then-linear then there should be massive stockpiles of unused vaccines by now. Are there?
Yes: https://www.axios.com/covid-astrazeneca-vaccine-us-doses-world-india-5a93ffad-dd9b-47a3-923a-9b62e6ed316d.html