Please stop politicizing vaccines!!!!

So, last night I watch the news and some scientist is basically intent on ripping the government a new one for claiming that we have no "national capacity to produce vaccines".

The argument is that there is a lab in Montreal which is state of the art and could produce the AstraZeneca vaccine and that he had written the government months ago to urge them to get production rights to that vaccine.

Here is the problem. Neither party is lying. We can only produce vaccines which we have the rights to produce. So, Canada can't produce the AstraZeneca vaccine. Saying we have capacity is meaningless. We can't legally do it. We can't even illegally do it. We would still require the knowledge and likely materials from AstraZeneca to do that.

Three other problems exist; we don't know what the negotiation process looked like, we would have had no way of knowing which vaccines would reach this stage and when, and, worse, there are actually ZERO vaccines which have actually completed clinical trials and been approved.

So, the first 2 kind of go together, but I'll start by saying this; more than likely it would have been more expensive to secure production rights than to produce purchasing agreements. In fact, production rights may not have even been an option. And even if they were, they may have been prohibitively expensive. Especially considering the other 2 points. You don't want to spend too much money on any one thing when you're trying to hedge your bets.

Along the same lines, all of these agreements were made when most vaccines in were in either stage 1 or stage 2 of their trials. At that point there were still very good odds that a vaccine candidate may not reach the end and delays were still very likely even for ones which do make it to the end. So, once again, when trying to secure a wide array of agreements it is important not to over invest in any one solution. 

When talking about capacity and focusing on the 3 most promising vaccines the last important point is that none of these vaccines are ready yet and there is no guarantee they will get green lit. And, of the 3, the only one which our facilities could possibly handle is the AstraZeneca one which is the furthest behind, the least effective and the most likely at this stage to flounder.

I also feel it incredibly prudent to point out that we are YEARS ahead of initial predictions on when a vaccine would be ready. It is actually FAR more typical for vaccine development to take 3-5 years. And many diseases never have a vaccine materialize.

In short, the whole topic is just infantile whining. You only care because others are getting it before you. And worse, you're still likely going to get it before most of the people in the world. So, you really have nothing to complain about. 

From the beginning, getting a vaccine was ALWAYS going to be a game of odds. There is nothing meritorious about the countries which will receive the first doses. You can't point to any specific policy and say "THAT is why they got it first". The US for example, benefits more from the size of its economy. This made it more likely that there would be producers in the US. And, it also enabled them to pay for more and better purchase agreements. Germany and the UK benefit simply because Pfizer is there. 

And, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are of a sort which has never been trialled in humans before. So, if anything, they had some of the greatest risk up front. Praising the US and condemning Canada for their response on this topic ignores reality. The US has more money. They also have 10x the population, so no surprise there. And both production and purchasing were dependent upon that cash and nothing else. 

Also, I will take a moment now to mention the waste. The byproduct of the cash induced spending spree. These purchasing agreements which every major nation has in place. They are legally binding agreements to buy a certain amount of vaccine. Whether they still need it or not. If 100% of these vaccines reach the end their trials successfully, we will have hundreds of millions of un-needed doses. We may have billions. Take that how you want.