The news broke yesterday that Donald Trump did not order enough doses of the Pfizer vaccine to go around. Not even close. So Pfizer sold its doses to other countries like Canada and the UK.
There are two possible reasons for this:
Pfizer was asked to join Warp Speed but there was a cost involved. In return for the government funding research, Pfizer would somehow be required to participate in a scheme to line Trump’s pockets. I don’t presume to know how this kickback would work but after the Ukraine affair last year, I have absolutely no doubt that there was a quid pro quo.
But here’s the thing about Pfizer. It’s Yuge. It’s vastly more enormous than most pharmas out there. It’s a gigantic, bloated, lumbering behemoth of a company that doesn’t even know all of what it’s got. It gobbled up a lot of other pharmas in the last 20 years and didn’t stop to taste its food while it was doing it. It has resources galore to throw at any portfolio item it thinks it can make a profit on.
We shouldn’t even be surprised at how quickly the vaccine was developed. We know a lot about biology of the immune system these days. There are several gene sequence and protein sequence databases out there that are public. I’ve used both US and European databases to do searches. The coronavirus proteins have been crystallized and are available at the RCSB database. Molecular biology techniques will allow you to predict where to slice a gene sequence to get you the right protein length and which vectors to use if you’re going that route. It’s very sophisticated. Find your gene sequence, order it from a synthetic gene company or in-house, get your experiments going in a few days.
Oh, sure, if time wasn’t of the essence, they’d do a better job of formulation so we wouldn’t have to carry around -80°C freezers or whatever temp it is. But the bottom line is that Donald Trump needed Pfizer a lot more than Pfizer needed Donald Trump. Plus, in the age of Wall Street bean counters running pharma, country loyalty is not important.
Second, Donald Trump had other companies working on a vaccine that he either had a financial interest in or, just as likely, didn’t benefit from the economy of scale that Pfizer has. For startups and smaller pharmas, the infusion of money from Warp Speed was probably critical in developing its own infrastructure overhead and capital investments. Research is extremely expensive. If maintaining your early research team depends on kicking back money to Trump, I’m guessing a lot of them did it. They didn’t have much of a choice. Covid gives them gravitas with other venture capitalists.
Maybe Donald thought, somewhat correctly, that one of these other companies would get the vaccine to market quickly. So he only paid for half an order of Pfizer’s vaccine. Tada!
We are now at the point that in order to get immediate benefits to flattening the curve and getting everyone back to work, we need to get the vaccine into as many people as possible. That would mean either Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines. Since Pfizer is ready to go (again, the benefits of being YUGE), it’s going to be Pfizer out there first.
But the US will lag the rest of the developing world in getting their economies back on track because all of Pfizer’s vaccine is committed. And as big as Pfizer is, there are probably a few rate limiting steps that will prevent it from producing millions more doses right away.
That’s where we are. We need Moderna now to get approved. How many doses of Moderna did we commit to? Are we short there as well? Because every shortage will just drag the recovery out further. While Florence is buzzing with Canadian tourists next June, we’ll still be stuck in the USA, personas non grata everywhere else in the world. We will be perceived as “dirty”.
One suggestion that might make the vaccine program more efficient is that anyone on the record or who believes that Covid is no big deal and no worse than the flu should be among the LAST people to get the shot. We’re talking about North Dakota and Iowa and all the MAGA maskholes out there.
After all, they don’t really need it, right? Let’s just vaccinate the sheeple.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Oh dear , Dirty Diaper isn`t going to get all his commissions . Sadz .
RD, what do you think about the AstraZeneca vaccine? I’ve signed up to participate in one of their trials. I’m waiting to hear if I’ll be accepted.
They all seem very promising. I haven’t read all of the details of the AZ vaccine but if I recall correctly, that vaccine doesn’t use mRNA. It uses spike protein. Not sure if that’s the whole spike protein or just fragments.
In either case, it’s just a way for the cells to present the coronavirus proteins on the surface of the cell so that T-cells can recognize it and start an immune response cascade, eventually ending up with trained T-cells and antibody producing B cells.
I hope you get accepted and that you get the actual vaccine and not placebo. Let us know how it goes.
A found out a little more.
AZ is using a vector to deliver the gene for the virus spike protein to your body. This is a common technique. The gene is incorporated into something like an adenovirus. Adenoviruses cause mild illnesses like colds. The entire genome of the virus is not in the vaccine, only part of it referring to the spike protein.
The advantage to this technique is that the vaccine is not as unstable as the mRNA vaccines. So if this vaccine works, it won’t need the same kind of cold storage. Probably regular refrigeration will work.
Okay, I went to my family practice doctor today, for my annual physical. I described my suspicious symptoms to her, and she has referred me to a partnership of cardiologists. I should be hearing from their office soon, to arrange a stress test (one of those where they put sensors on you while you walk on a treadmill).
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Seasonal song from the Kinks: