<story><title>Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing</title><url>https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alex_young</author><text>The scale of thinking here is amazingly constricted.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if we had approached this like we did WWII.&lt;p&gt;We would have nationalized the effort to produce vaccines, building entire production chains and staffing them with anyone in need of work.&lt;p&gt;We would have built infrastructure to produce n95 masks and shipped them to every address.&lt;p&gt;What would this mean?  We would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, employed millions of people, strengthened our economy, and would now be wrapping up vaccinating everyone.&lt;p&gt;Our response to the crisis should be noted as a failure of monumental proportions.  The lack of leadership at all levels of government continues to be astounding.</text></comment>
<story><title>Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing</title><url>https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GavinB</author><text>&lt;i&gt;So no, we did not “have the vaccine” in February.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;We did have it, we just didn&amp;#x27;t know which one it was. And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.&lt;p&gt;We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines, but we decided to play if &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; and will now be spending over a trillion &lt;i&gt;again&lt;/i&gt; to try to save the economy.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t blame the pharma companies for this. Our government and medical establishment was not intellectually prepared to make the hard decisions required to save us. And we need to be building momentum to learn how to do better.</text></comment>