Gov't scientists don't go in and set up the eggs, inject the cultivation, etc
Sure they don't do the work themselves but they set all the rules for it. In Europe they allow adjuvants, they also don't require as much delay as the American government does. If the rules are faulty, or at least questionable, and lead to delays, then the people who set the rules are to blame.
Having said that, they screwed up the yields
The yields where low, that doesn't necessarily amount to a screw up, the same methods that worked before with vaccines produced lower yields this time. Then the companies adjusted their methods and yields rose, but the government requirements delay the impact of those new methods by requiring much longer waiting and checking periods than in other countries. Also for the same amount of virus we could have produced more doses with adjuvants, like many other countries are doing, but government policy came out against them. If they where used we would have been able to produce two to four times as much vaccine during any given period, even if no other policy was changed. If the waiting/testing periods where adjusted to be closer to the European standard than the first batches after yields where improved would have come out much quicker.
Just those two recent policy changes would be enough that we wouldn't have a shortage anymore, but government meddling that impacts vaccine production has a much longer history than that. Producing vaccines is such a marginal business partially because of the price controls put in place by the government. Hillary Clinton authored the bill that pushed prices down and pushed other producers out of the market. Now we have one facility in the US that produces vaccines. The others have gone out of business. If we still had them we would have had more production capability and more chances to get good yields in the earlier batches as different companies used slightly different methods. Or they may have used very different methods that don't involve eggs, but investment in getting these new technologies out mostly dried up once the government took the profit out of it.
mispresented to the gov't how much vaccine they could get to the gov't by what date.
Which didn't cause the shortage just made it more of a surprise. And without the government rules in place
1 - We probably would have had other facilities available so this one case of poor yield wouldn't have meant so much.
2 - For every unit of virus that was produced we could have produced 2 to 4 times as much vaccine.
3 - Once the yields where fixed the first new larger batches would have come out much quicker.
4 - We might not be reliant on egg based production at all, keeping the whole problem from arising in the first place.
However, you have such a strong bias against gov't that you ASSumed that the gov't was at fault.
No I have highly specific points about how the government is at fault which you just ignore. Sure companies screw up with out any government help, and its not like they have done everything perfectly in this case, but the vaccine market has been messed up because of government intervention, at least since 1993. |
