Europe's Vaccine Disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#41

Post by throwawayboise » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

d1zzy wrote: post #9

jacquesm wrote: post #5

It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the ill…

I think humanity (as a species) is able to overcome situations like this, but not without large loss of life (and potentially setback in culture, technology, society). So I wouldn't be too concerned about humanity, just about our current civilization.

Yes humanity has suffered and survived far worse than COVID-19, even if you imagine that nothing at all had been done to mitigte it.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#42

Post by partiallypro » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #22

cdavid wrote: post #7

I wonder if this will become a watershed moment for the EU. I've always been an ardent believer in the European program, both for historical reasons (I have French and German grand parents), but also because for all its warts, I believed the EU had a competent bureaucracy, able to go above the pettyness of national politics. French politicians of all side love scapegoating EU for their own failures. To say that the c…

The US has twice the per capita covid deaths as Germany. Great success right there, hurrah!

Germany's death rate since the fall is higher than the US though. The US largely bungled the initial response, where as Europe seems to have bungled the ongoing problem.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#43

Post by fabbari » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

jeofken wrote: post #27

MrRiddle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

In Sweden the death rate during 2020 was equal to the average for the last 10 years. We had zero restrictions until a couple of months ago.

  No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions.

  Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad.

[0] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#44

Post by mrtksn » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #38

mrtksn wrote: post #32

I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines. Very populous countries are getting them and any distrust towards the reporting of these vaccines could have been scrutinized(Turkey run its own "stage 3" on the Chinese one, got its own numbers and is inspecting the deliveries for 2 weeks before vaccinating the population). Now we have this situation where EU is lagging behind very se…

This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.

I’m sure dying off and keeping businesses shut will be huge political win when the allies return to normal.

Everyone will appreciate the bad contract and simply not make big deal out of it. Take a knee for the western alliance.

When we are on it, we should also ban Xiaomi and TikTok.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#45

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #19

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

More importantly for a vaccine that is sold at cost, the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2. Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna. If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 b…

The US spent quite a lot, but still came in very conservative. The initial orders (combined) of Pfizer/Moderna were enough for 75 million people. Vs likely demand of at least 200 million.

For $40 billion (which we are estimated to lose every 4 or 5 days), we could have ordered 300 million of each of them.

There's likely some materials that are scarce enough not to waste (we need billions of vaccines globally), but production also seems to have started very late in the trial/approval process.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#46

Post by Exmoor » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

I've been wondering when these chickens would come home to roost. There are a few countries who have heavily touted how many vaccines they've agreed to buy, but aren't being nearly as vocal about when they're going to actually have them in hand. Having contracts to vaccinate everyone in your country 4 times over doesn't do much good if you don't get those people any dose for another 9 months. It now seems plausible that countries like the US and and UK could have vaccinated everyone who wants to be by the beginning of summer. There are governments who have been fairly smug about their handling of the crisis who may be many months behind that schedule.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#47

Post by roenxi » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

Diggsey wrote: post #40

roenxi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume literally the entire job of the negotiating team is to negotiate the price down. If their job isn't to negotiate the price down, what are the negotiators hired for? If they are just going to take the market price, there doesn't need to be a negotiation team. Just let companies sell the vaccine to whoever at whatever price. They didn't lose sight of the big picture, they did what they were there to do.

A negotiation can be for anything: it could be to include additional safe-guards in the contract for example... You could even negotiate a higher price in exchange for something more valuable (for example, paying extra per vaccine in exchange for building more capacity sooner...)

A "Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sends negotiators to get highest vaccine price worldwide!" headline would be even worse for the negotiators political career than "[She seeks] to Duck Responsibility". They aren't going to negotiate higher prices on a vaccine in a global emergency.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#48

Post by dogma1138 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #47

Diggsey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A negotiation can be for anything: it could be to include additional safe-guards in the contract for example... You could even negotiate a higher price in exchange for something more valuable (for example, paying extra per vaccine in exchange for building more capacity sooner...)

A "Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sends negotiators to get highest vaccine price worldwide!" headline would be even worse for the negotiators political career than "[She seeks] to Duck Responsibility". They aren't going to negotiate higher prices on a vaccine in a global emergency.

Why not? Israel did just that, they offered double the US price for their doses + full access to the medical data.

They vaccinated half their population whilst the EU is stuck making a surprised Pikachu face.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#49

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

plandis wrote: post #4

munk-a wrote: post #3

This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it. These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity…

> Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production I was under the assumption that Project Warp Speed explicitly directed funding from the US government to help ramp up production while vaccines were still being tested. Did that not happen?

It did, it just wasn't ambitious enough. There were separate grants, but the preorders were only enough to cover the entire population if multiple vaccines were approved.

I guess it is possible that production was scaled up as fast as possible, but it seems that there was a lack of imagination in the planning process (setting low goals, not anticipating far enough ahead, etc).

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#50

Post by Throwawayaerlei » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods.

Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this to work like the Novavax version of roughly the same thing that's just reported good U.K. trial results, but Sanofi/GSK's didn't provide a good enough response in the elderly. They were expected to fulfill up to half of the EU's requirements, but they're restarting with a new Phase I trial next month or so, and they might have something ready by the end of 2021.

So if all that is correct, the EU ended up with a very big hole in their plans and not enough redundancy. By comparison only because I'm in the USA and familiar with our efforts, 5 big bets were made with more than a billion dollars each in up front R&D money. Moderna and now Novavax are looking very good, AZ/Oxford and one dose of Johnson and Johnson's is looking OK, with a two dose study in progress for the latter that might show increased efficacy, and only Sanofi/GSK failed in a really major way.