But, if we’d paid for more than we needed, the US could have donated or sold surplus to another country. Pfizer had to scrounge for resources to make what they did make. More likely that Trump was still in love with the idea that hydroxychloroquine, convalescent plasma, remdesivir and such were “game changers”, so he didn’t understand the need for a vaccine. We did stockpile and buy more than we needed of those therapeuitcs, without concern for the poor folk (or people with lupus) getting any. This is the guy who ran casinos that lost money, it’s how he rolls. The deficit is the worst it’s been, he’s lowered taxes on the rich and has increased spending on things he likes with abandon. He spends money being selfish all the time. It’s who he is. ETA: I know there’s logistic elements with Pfizer’s vaccine needing to be at -70, but that early in production, those problems of where it’ll be produced could have been remedied. If too many vaccines worked out, then we use Pfizer here, and sell/donate the more travel friendly vaccines elsewhere.
I agree with most of your thoughts on the president’s actions. I guess I just feel we have already paid for twice as much as we need, and it isn’t like the vaccine manufacturers are going to lose money on this. I think that by letting other countries in the world buy it (those who are more likely to share it than we might be), by passing on getting even more, we are actually sharing better, although I feel it would have been better to join the international groups and work on a world-wide distribution plan since we are really all in this together. Of course it is also possible that had we thrown down way back then and paid for a whole lot more, we might have discovered that it didn’t work at all, and we’d have thrown the money away. I would like to have been a fly on the wall as the government was making those decisions, and I’d like to know who made the decisions on how much of which vaccine to buy. I think I heard that we have purchased nearly all of the Moderna vaccine that will be made. Tough call on what it the right balance when your underlying mindset is one of going it alone and not playing nice with the rest of the world.
He wanted the PR boost from being the president who “delivered the vaccine”, everything after that was pretty irrelevant to him.
Ultimately, the truth will be that we should have been on this like white on rice starting in January, when Rick Bright was saying we needed vaccines, stat. Had we used the National Defense Authorization act to get companies geared up and fully supplied, we wouldn’t have been struggling with PPE, test kits, contact tracing resources and vaccines. Vaccines are often a best guess scenario, including relatively known bugs like the flu. Some years, like 2014/15, we guess wrong, and the vaccine is not what it could have been. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2016/04/study-prior-year-vaccination-cut-flu-vaccine-effects-2014-15#:~: As we get better and faster at vaccine manufacture, will hopefully be less guesswork. The cost from the pandemic to the US economy has been estimated at 16 trillion, so while it’s a tough pill to swallow then, had we risked a few billion here and there, we’d have saved trillions in the long run. As they say, a trillion here, a trillion there, soon you’re talking REAL money. Figuring out how to quickly develop vaccines is going to help us next go-around with the next bug. There will be a next bug, and one after that, etc. Going it alone adds to the world’s cost, and likely to US costs. Hoping we rejoin WHO on January 20th. Not a perfect institution of course, but does more good than harm, the lack did more harm than good.
Agreed, also we shouldn’t be running a government like a company. You need to fully fund public health initiatives and teams all the time so that when you need them, they are there. You don’t cut out your emergency services because you haven’t used them in X years, you pay for that insurance of having them around because when you need them, you need them NOW.
Plus, it’s winter and you hardly need a special freezer in Canada, so there’s that as well.
Well that’s just UN-AMERICAN!!! /sarcasm
(In all seriousness, you are 1000% correct- we are seeing what happens when some idiot who think he knows how to run a business tries to run a government in the same manner.)
Warp speed straight into a black hole
The surprising bit here is that an opportunity for a rushed and ill-scrutinized procurement process apparently arose and there wasn’t a single opportunistic con man who stepped up and arranged some sort of sordid kickback scheme or the like.
Seems like a missed opportunity.
I’m fairly certain it has happened with some of the pharmaceuticals and test kits. My guess is the vaccine is too high profile for him to risk getting his hands greased.
They did some quick, sloppy, bad math and ordered enough to dose the Drumpf voters who survive until the vaccine is available but aren’t true-believer enough refuse it. Now that we know they were OK with mass death as long as it was mostly Democrats, that explanation doesn’t even seem cynical.
What if we threw a pandemic and everybody came?! Think of the real estate opportunities!
Ugh.
Four words: Trump bought Moderna stock.
The idea that said con man didn’t see $$Billions in the MAGA mask market is beyond me. He could have kept more of his fans alive, the economy would not have shut down as much, and he’d probably have 4 more years. Hubris? Stupidity? Lost opportunity to make $billions. So he resorts to bilking his fans for “election integrity”. Sigh.
It’s important to remember Trump was always very bad at business.
The thing to note here is not that Trump would let his disgusting jingoism hamper vaccination efforts in other countries but that he is so predictable that Canada foresaw that and was planning around it. This is the first thing governments of the world think now when dealing with US foreign policy: “how will they screw us over and what can we do to minimise that risk?”.
“We have no reason to think whatsoever that access to the Pfizer vaccine will be in any way disturbed. Deliberately, in the contracts themselves, we contemplated having access to production facilities on more than one continent,” he said.
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