> All that said, we are vaccinating at a rate of over a million people per day today because of what the Trump administration set in motion a year ago. They pushed for and succeeded at having multiple vaccines developed in the span of eight months
Say what now? If i'm not mistaken, none of the first vaccines ( Sputnik V, Chinese one, Pfizer/Biontech, AstraZeneca/Oxford) have anything to do with the US. Moderna and J&J are the only ones developed with US funding. So saying that the plethora of vaccines we got was due to the Trump administration is... wrong. Any even remotely sane administration ( which i know isn't a given for the Trump one) would have financed vaccine development, and many did ( UK with Oxford, France with Sanofi and Institut Pasteur ( both failures, Russia with theirs, etc. etc.)
> Warp Speed tried to fund Pfizer, Pfizer declined. That's hardly the administrations fault.
Indeed, it's not their fault, but it's also wrong to say they have anything to do with it.
> Also not including Moderna in your list of first vaccines is pretty self-serving considering it was approved (fine, EUA'd) one week after Pfizer.
Indeed i fucked up, i wanted to say none of the initial ones bar Moderna, and then say only Moderna and the J&J one were funded by the US, but changed the structure to avoid repetition and it came out wrong.
> Even the claim that Pfizer wasn't funded by the US is disingenuous; the US placed an order for 100 million doses of it in July for almost $2 billion.
Ordering something with payment on delivery doesn't fund its development:
quote from the press release:
> The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval. The U.S. government also can acquire up to an additional 500 million doses.
First: "Please develop a vaccine for us. Go quickly. Invest massive amounts of money and resources. We might buy some from you. If someone else comes up with it first, we'll buy from them."
Second: "Here's an irrevocable order for two billion US dollars for a product we need you to develop immediately. Go! Go! Go!".
No business with risk it all under the first scenario. It would be suicidal.
The second scenario. One where you are given guaranteed payment for a result as well as everything else that goes with it (lowering regulatory barriers, fast-track FDA action, help in mass manufacturing and organizing mass distribution, etc.). Yeah, the second scenario is vastly different.
Put it in terms of a startup. Imagine going to a VC and saying "I have this idea but no clue if anyone will buy it", vs. "I have this idea and I have this irrevocable US government order for two billion dollars of my product and all the support I need to make it happen quickly". Which one of the two do you think will get funded in a microsecond?
Yes, because making a vaccine for which there are over 7 billion customers that need it is absolutely the same as selling whatever. Production capacity is so far below what is needed that any vaccine manufactured in the first year or two is guaranteed to be bought.
In any case, the question at hand was whether or not the US admin funded Pfizer, and it did not. It gave them assurances, but so did many other entities ( like the EU), so the US really cannot be hailed as some sort of visionaries that made the vaccines possible with their generous help ( which was what GP was claiming).
You've missed the real issues; they weren't the only one making a vaccine and their vaccine wasn't by any means guaranteed to be good much less the best.
Without that pre-order, they had no guarantee that they would get any money. What if their vaccine turned out to be 50% effective? 30%?
You said that the administration should have funded vaccine development. They offered funding and were declined. They also funded J&J and Moderna, and provided purchase guarantees for Pfizer when they weren't allowed to fund it. In other words, the plethora of vaccines that we have is in part thanks to the actions of the administration.
What, specifically, are you suggesting they should have done that they didn't with regard to funding?
Edit: there are innumerable things we can point to that the Trump administration did wrong during the pandemic that made things worse. We don't need to invent new ones that are easily disproved.
Say what now? If i'm not mistaken, none of the first vaccines ( Sputnik V, Chinese one, Pfizer/Biontech, AstraZeneca/Oxford) have anything to do with the US. Moderna and J&J are the only ones developed with US funding. So saying that the plethora of vaccines we got was due to the Trump administration is... wrong. Any even remotely sane administration ( which i know isn't a given for the Trump one) would have financed vaccine development, and many did ( UK with Oxford, France with Sanofi and Institut Pasteur ( both failures, Russia with theirs, etc. etc.)