> We could have ordered 300 million courses each of the top 5 or 10 vaccine candidates for, in essence, peanuts.
It sounds as though you're talking about the advance purchases that the U.S. made as part of its "Operation Warp Speed" -- except that you (reasonably) would have liked those purchases to be even larger than they were.
Yeah, I'm aware of the of the advance purchases. And I wouldn't say I'm arguing for them to be "even larger", as I'm saying that 5x larger would be a good starting point.
For the less expensive vaccines it doesn't make any sense at all that they ordered 100 million doses instead of 300 million. For the mRNA vaccines I have a lot of questions about how hard they tried to identify potential bottlenecks in say, July (but I don't think there is much information available to decide in either direction.).
Whatever the word for it, the government should have provided and deployed the resources to vastly scale up manufacturing of each reasonable candidate (so say, when phase III trials began).
I link a working paper in another comment where some economists estimate that we left an awful lot on the table. The US less than the globe, but given the shared benefits, this would be a great issue for a wealthy country to take a leadership role on.
It sounds as though you're talking about the advance purchases that the U.S. made as part of its "Operation Warp Speed" -- except that you (reasonably) would have liked those purchases to be even larger than they were.
See especially the table in https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/inside-op...