My jaw dropped at “~500 doses”. At $2 per dose… that’s significantly cheaper than it’s costing the companies to produce the official vaccine. What am I missing here? I know you’re making a different thing than Moderna, but if the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
I think you’re underselling the potential benefit here! Doing a batch of this and distributing it to 500 people may be unfeasible. I assume the FDA or something comes for you if you’re trying to commercially distribute home-brewed vaccines.
But say, to 20 friends? Why not. Which brings the price down to $50 per/person, which seems like it’d be totally worth it to have immunity even a month earlier than the official vaccine is available to me. And it potentially gives immunity to your whole social scene.
I’ll wait for your results, and then will strongly consider doing a batch of this myself.
Oh, it’s far, far worse (better?) than $2 per dose. As a thought experiment, I price estimated buying enough peptide for a hundred thousand doses, and it only costs about ten thousand dollars. Ten cents a dose is closer to realistic if you buy in bulk.
Which also brings to mind a question of civilizational inadequacy: if we really cared and it really mattered, why not have every university with a lab in the country crank out a hundred thousand doses per week to their local populace?
I don’t think this has ever been possible in previous epidemics, at least for at-home manufacture.
That being said, I would strongly support compiling a list of low-risk interventions like this, so next time we can publicize them at the outset and try mitigating the problem while waiting for the low-risk&high-success solution to be developed.
If the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
There are a number of costs that Moderna/Pfizer/Astrazenica incur that a homebrew vaccine does not. Of the top of my head:
1. Salaries for the (presumably highly educated) lab techs that put this stuff together. I don’t know johnswentwort background, but presumably he wouldn’t exactly be asking minimum wage if he was doing this commercially.
2. Costs of running large scale trials and going through all the paperwork to get FDA approval. I think I’m generally more in favour of organisations like the FDA than a lot of people here, but even I expect this to be a very non-insignificant number.
3. Various taxes and costs of shipping/storing the vaccine until it can get to customers.
4. Costs of liability and a desire for the company to make a profit on this (as well as to pay the salaries for the all of the people needed to keep a large company running).
Given all that I don’t think the gap between this and the commercial vaccines is that insane.
1. Salaries can’t add much, especially if you’re looking at mass producing. If you’re creating 500 vaccines then maybe it takes a couple of hours? Say $20/hour (looking at local job listings for this kind of role) we get 8c/dose on salary. As you scale this is only going to go down.
2. It seems like vaccine trials can be done for a few hundred million although there is a big variation and I’m not completely sure whether the numbers given there include some manufacturing build up. If a large pharma company is going to be making lots of vaccine it seems like they should be able to achieve that for less than $1/dose.
3a. Taxes may add a decent few percent but can’t be a main driver of cost
3b. Shipping costs for refrigerated goods are maybe 5c per 1000 miles per kg. That data is from a while back (1988!) and costs might be a bit higher for colder temperatures but I can’t see this being a large fraction of the cost.
4a. For liability I note that at least AstraZeneca have struck deals in most countries to be exempt from such liabilities. It seems that in the US all COVID vaccines will benefit from this.
4b. Some companies (at least AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) have said that they will be selling their COVID vaccines at cost. Even lacking this, I wouldn’t expect corporate profits to be huge, even just from a PR point of view.
Additionally:
5. Risk of failed vaccine trials. If you only expect to have a 1 in 3 chance of successful stage 3 trial then the $1/dose from 2 becomes $3/dose to expect to break even. I’m not sure whether this risk is covered by governments—I think it was to some extent but am not confident.
Given Dentin’s comment that the material cost if something like 10c/dose (which makes sense given how little it cost to double John’s peptides order) then I think most of the cost looks like it is in the trials and risk of failure thereof but this isn’t enough to explain why companies aren’t doing this. Its probably too late now anyway as vaccines already approved should have the pandemic under control before any new trials would be complete.
why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
Both the other comments here are on-point. The materials for large amounts of radvac would cost pennies per dose, because the cost-per-unit of the peptides drops very rapidly as you scale up (remember, we doubled our order for <10% extra cost).
However, in general, people and logistics are a bigger expense than materials for most products these days, and I certainly expect that to apply to vaccines.
As someone else said, the logistical difficulties for this are much larger than the standard jab method, the production process doesn’t scale well, and once prepared it doesn’t last long even if you freeze it. Making this for 20 friends and distributing it to them is very plausibly net-harmful, because you need to gather in close quarters to hand off the prepared vaccine, do it within a fairly short window (1-3 days) for all 20, and then repeat all that, including the production of new doses, at least once per week and ideally 2-3x per week. Given that the only evidence for efficacy is in silico, none in vitro let alone in vivo or in actual humans, it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the increased risk of spread from all that close contact.
Why would they have to gather in close quarters? One person could make it in their kitchen, then leave the room while others come in one at a time to self administer their dose.
20 people sequentially, over a day or two, navigating an unfamiliar kitchen, without contact with the host? Not gonna happen. Most of them, at least, are going to have substantial exposure to the host (and vice versa).
It should not take more than 5 minutes to go in to the room, sit at the one available seat, locate the object placed on a bright red background, and use said inhaler. You open the window and run a fan, so that there is air circulation. If multiple people arrive at once, use cellphones to coordinate who goes in first—the other person sits in their car.
It really isn’t challenging to make this safe, given the audience is “the sort of people who read LessWrong.”
Totally agree, and this is pretty much what I had in mind as well. The organizer can also host a Zoom call beforehand where they explain the procedure, answer any questions, and let people sign up for times spaced out by 5-10 minutes to self administer.
None of that sounds like a thing most people attempting to arrange this will manage to do without exhausting some scarce resources; primarily willpower but also social capital, relationship closeness, and other fuzzy things. People on LessWrong are worse, not better, than the general population, both at weighing those costs and at bearing them.
You don’t need to gather in close quarters. You can simply drop it off in front of people’s front doors and coordinate with mobile phones.
One person does the work of making the doses. Every other person gets tasked with doing one distribution run that they can either do themselves if they have a car/bike/motorcycle or outsource to another person (maybe a taskrabbit). They then travel around and put the microcentrifuge tubes either into postage box of someone or in front of their door when they are there and have the person open the door a minute later to pick up the microcentrifuge tube.
That’s only for raw materials. Actual production seems to have involved a fair amount of skilled labor per dose which probably dominates the $2 figure. A commercial vaccine can automate that but then you’ve got lots of development costs as well as logistics and compliance to worry about. I wouldn’t expect that this vaccine is especially cheap.
My jaw dropped at “~500 doses”. At $2 per dose… that’s significantly cheaper than it’s costing the companies to produce the official vaccine. What am I missing here? I know you’re making a different thing than Moderna, but if the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
I think you’re underselling the potential benefit here! Doing a batch of this and distributing it to 500 people may be unfeasible. I assume the FDA or something comes for you if you’re trying to commercially distribute home-brewed vaccines.
But say, to 20 friends? Why not. Which brings the price down to $50 per/person, which seems like it’d be totally worth it to have immunity even a month earlier than the official vaccine is available to me. And it potentially gives immunity to your whole social scene.
I’ll wait for your results, and then will strongly consider doing a batch of this myself.
Oh, it’s far, far worse (better?) than $2 per dose. As a thought experiment, I price estimated buying enough peptide for a hundred thousand doses, and it only costs about ten thousand dollars. Ten cents a dose is closer to realistic if you buy in bulk.
Which also brings to mind a question of civilizational inadequacy: if we really cared and it really mattered, why not have every university with a lab in the country crank out a hundred thousand doses per week to their local populace?
I don’t think this has ever been possible in previous epidemics, at least for at-home manufacture.
That being said, I would strongly support compiling a list of low-risk interventions like this, so next time we can publicize them at the outset and try mitigating the problem while waiting for the low-risk&high-success solution to be developed.
There are a number of costs that Moderna/Pfizer/Astrazenica incur that a homebrew vaccine does not. Of the top of my head:
1. Salaries for the (presumably highly educated) lab techs that put this stuff together. I don’t know johnswentwort background, but presumably he wouldn’t exactly be asking minimum wage if he was doing this commercially.
2. Costs of running large scale trials and going through all the paperwork to get FDA approval. I think I’m generally more in favour of organisations like the FDA than a lot of people
here, but even I expect this to be a very non-insignificant number.
3. Various taxes and costs of shipping/storing the vaccine until it can get to customers.
4. Costs of liability and a desire for the company to make a profit on this (as well as to pay the salaries for the all of the people needed to keep a large company running).
Given all that I don’t think the gap between this and the commercial vaccines is that insane.
Trying to quantify these effects:
1. Salaries can’t add much, especially if you’re looking at mass producing. If you’re creating 500 vaccines then maybe it takes a couple of hours? Say $20/hour (looking at local job listings for this kind of role) we get 8c/dose on salary. As you scale this is only going to go down.
2. It seems like vaccine trials can be done for a few hundred million although there is a big variation and I’m not completely sure whether the numbers given there include some manufacturing build up. If a large pharma company is going to be making lots of vaccine it seems like they should be able to achieve that for less than $1/dose.
3a. Taxes may add a decent few percent but can’t be a main driver of cost
3b. Shipping costs for refrigerated goods are maybe 5c per 1000 miles per kg. That data is from a while back (1988!) and costs might be a bit higher for colder temperatures but I can’t see this being a large fraction of the cost.
4a. For liability I note that at least AstraZeneca have struck deals in most countries to be exempt from such liabilities. It seems that in the US all COVID vaccines will benefit from this.
4b. Some companies (at least AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) have said that they will be selling their COVID vaccines at cost. Even lacking this, I wouldn’t expect corporate profits to be huge, even just from a PR point of view.
Additionally:
5. Risk of failed vaccine trials. If you only expect to have a 1 in 3 chance of successful stage 3 trial then the $1/dose from 2 becomes $3/dose to expect to break even. I’m not sure whether this risk is covered by governments—I think it was to some extent but am not confident.
Given Dentin’s comment that the material cost if something like 10c/dose (which makes sense given how little it cost to double John’s peptides order) then I think most of the cost looks like it is in the trials and risk of failure thereof but this isn’t enough to explain why companies aren’t doing this. Its probably too late now anyway as vaccines already approved should have the pandemic under control before any new trials would be complete.
Both the other comments here are on-point. The materials for large amounts of radvac would cost pennies per dose, because the cost-per-unit of the peptides drops very rapidly as you scale up (remember, we doubled our order for <10% extra cost).
However, in general, people and logistics are a bigger expense than materials for most products these days, and I certainly expect that to apply to vaccines.
As someone else said, the logistical difficulties for this are much larger than the standard jab method, the production process doesn’t scale well, and once prepared it doesn’t last long even if you freeze it. Making this for 20 friends and distributing it to them is very plausibly net-harmful, because you need to gather in close quarters to hand off the prepared vaccine, do it within a fairly short window (1-3 days) for all 20, and then repeat all that, including the production of new doses, at least once per week and ideally 2-3x per week. Given that the only evidence for efficacy is in silico, none in vitro let alone in vivo or in actual humans, it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the increased risk of spread from all that close contact.
Why would they have to gather in close quarters? One person could make it in their kitchen, then leave the room while others come in one at a time to self administer their dose.
20 people sequentially, over a day or two, navigating an unfamiliar kitchen, without contact with the host? Not gonna happen. Most of them, at least, are going to have substantial exposure to the host (and vice versa).
It should not take more than 5 minutes to go in to the room, sit at the one available seat, locate the object placed on a bright red background, and use said inhaler. You open the window and run a fan, so that there is air circulation. If multiple people arrive at once, use cellphones to coordinate who goes in first—the other person sits in their car.
It really isn’t challenging to make this safe, given the audience is “the sort of people who read LessWrong.”
Totally agree, and this is pretty much what I had in mind as well. The organizer can also host a Zoom call beforehand where they explain the procedure, answer any questions, and let people sign up for times spaced out by 5-10 minutes to self administer.
None of that sounds like a thing most people attempting to arrange this will manage to do without exhausting some scarce resources; primarily willpower but also social capital, relationship closeness, and other fuzzy things. People on LessWrong are worse, not better, than the general population, both at weighing those costs and at bearing them.
You don’t need to gather in close quarters. You can simply drop it off in front of people’s front doors and coordinate with mobile phones.
One person does the work of making the doses. Every other person gets tasked with doing one distribution run that they can either do themselves if they have a car/bike/motorcycle or outsource to another person (maybe a taskrabbit). They then travel around and put the microcentrifuge tubes either into postage box of someone or in front of their door when they are there and have the person open the door a minute later to pick up the microcentrifuge tube.
Besides the distribution methods already proposed, one could depending on the circumstances, simply distribute it outside with masks.
That’s only for raw materials. Actual production seems to have involved a fair amount of skilled labor per dose which probably dominates the $2 figure. A commercial vaccine can automate that but then you’ve got lots of development costs as well as logistics and compliance to worry about. I wouldn’t expect that this vaccine is especially cheap.