Kolek planning to go pro
Forgetful, could you (or anyone else) explain a little about how these pre-purchases work? I'm generally far from a Trump administration apologist, but it seems like a really tough spot to determine how to purchase/reserve from a number of competing vaccines, all before any have received any approvals and it seems even before release of sufficient testing data to project which will be the most successful? I'm not jazzed about what I'm hearing about the untested nature of the Moderna technology nor their track record of bringing products to market, but was the alternative to put all of our eggs in the Pfizer basket? In that case, would it have been possible that another vaccine proved more effective than Pfizer, and we'd be blaming the administration for just throwing gobs of money at Pfizer without sufficient evidence that it shouldn't have been diversifying among the vaccine candidates?
Extremely short-sighted and odd move.
Thanks to everyone that responded. I am pretty ignorant on how the particulars of buying doses before approval or full development of the data, so this has been helpful.
The advisory panel voted 17-4 for approval of the vaccine. Is it normal to have about 20% of the panel go against a vaccine and still have it OK’d? Is it usually unanimous or closer to it?
Drugs are often approved with split votes. In this case, I would not be too troubled by the four dissenting votes. As I understand it, the chief concern was use in 16 and 17-year-olds. Frankly, I was surprised that they even considered this, and expected it only to be considered (and approved) for ages 18 and up.
I just saw that Pfizer said that the 100 million doses might be all we get until June. Not good news.
I didn't realize they approved it for 16 an 17 year olds. That is surprising, and kind of odd, as I think it is completely unnecessary to authorize it for 16 and 17 year olds at the moment as they will not be remotely near any priority groups.
Trump orders FDA chief to authorize vaccine today or he will be fired.
Maybe it's a controlling rights and patent issue thing, but could say Phizer and Moderna contract out production of the vaccine recipes to other pharmaceutical companies to ramp up production and availability way quicker?
I think the bigger issue is that we really haven't ever mass produced an mRNA vaccine, so the types of production facilities for making these formulations on scale, and also even making and validating the mRNA sequences on this type of scale, never really existed until Moderna and Pfizer built it.