1/ If we had more vaccines we could bring an end to the deaths and lockdowns.

We could have produced these vaccines last year if governments had taken the risk to pay for their production, before they were approved.

It was a huge mistake to not do this.
We should not repeat it.
2/ There are 239 COVID vaccines under development.

It will take time until we know which ones will actually work and it will often take many months until they are possibly approved.



But we could risk now to produce these vaccines already.
3/ If a vaccine that we pay for now won’t work in the end we have to throw the produced vaccines away.


But if a vaccine does work we are in a much better position then:
We will have a working vaccine with millions of doses ready to protect people.
4/ Even if we might end up having to throw away some vaccines it would likely still be worth pursuing this strategy – just because the costs of the pandemic are so high.

Even just in economic terms: vaccine production costs billions, the pandemic costs many trillions.
5/ Think about how fantastic it would have been if governments had taken the risk to produce as many mRNA vaccines as possible.

Let’s think carefully which unapproved vaccines we should produce now so that we don’t end up making the same mistake twice.
6/ If there is a change to strongly increase the production of the already approved vaccines then we should of course also do that.
For the mRNA vaccines this doesn’t seem to be the case blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exp…

And to get it to 7.8 billion people it would make sense to do both.
7/ The idea has been there all along – and several countries have followed this idea in the last year.


But governments were not embracing it strongly enough to supply as many vaccines as we’d need to fight a global pandemic, they were too risk averse.
8/ A lot of people were seeing this clearly and we have to thank them for setting up institutions like COVAX.


So when I said 'It was a huge mistake to not do this.’ in the first tweet I should have said 'It was a huge mistake to not do this much more.'

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More from @MaxCRoser

14 Jan
Let’s assume that the cost estimates of that study are much too optimistic and the true cost of producing the vaccine will be $200 billion in the end – it would still be less than the economic losses in just *month* last year.
That’s just the loss in production (4.5% decline of global GDP according to the IMF: imf.org/external/datam…).

The full ‘cost’ of the pandemic is of course much larger than that – the pandemic’s impact on our daily lives, people being sick, people dying.
The point is:
estimate of the pandemic’s cost that is much too low >> estimate of the cost to produce vaccines that is much higher than what this study estimates
Read 4 tweets
13 Jan
This study estimates the cost to produce the missing vaccines to protect *the entire world* from COVID.
mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/1/…

Facilities to produce 16 billion doses of a Moderna type vaccines would only cost around $4 billion, ~$2 a jab.

Easily the best deal of the decade.
If this is even remotely true it is unbelievably exciting news. 10- or 100-times that price would be cheap.

This important article outlines a plan for how to pull it off (it's based on the paper above).
nytimes.com/2021/01/12/opi…

Here is a perspective on the $4 billion price tag. Image
For the total cost of the entire production operation of this vaccine this is the relevant table – and the Moderna type vaccine is the one on the left.

CapEx = total capital investment cost
OpEx = annual operating cost Image
Read 11 tweets
8 Jan
It was wrong to believe that 'saving the economy' was an alternative to 'saving people's lives’.

If anything it is the other way around and the two goals go together so that countries that kept the health impact of the pandemic lower suffered smaller economic consequences.
This isn’t a new insight, it’s just more up to date data.
It was obvious early on in the pandemic and has been said by many economists for months.

Here is my colleague @JoeHasell’s post from last summer on the same point: ourworldindata.org/covid-health-e…
Or here is me last July saying the same.

It was my expectation then, now we have the data.

Read 4 tweets
1 Jan
Israel hat 11.5% der Bevölkerung geimpft
Deutschland 0.2%

Es liegt nicht daran, dass kein Impfstoff vorhanden ist.

Laut @jensspahn haben wir 1,3 Millionen Dosen erhalten.
Aber laut RKI haben wir nur 165,575 verimpft.

Währenddessen sterben hunderte und wir sitzen im Lockdown.
@jensspahn Özlem Türeci, Uğur Şahin und ihre Kollegen sagten, dass sie im vergangenen Jahr über Monate Nächte durchgearbeitet haben.

Angela Merkel war zu Recht »mächtig stolz« auf deren Leistung und jetzt scheitern wir daran den Impfstoff zu verwenden.

spiegel.de/politik/deutsc…
@jensspahn Für diejenigen die sagen, dass ein kleines Land wie Israel (8,9 Millionen) nicht mit Deutschland vergleichbar ist:
Baden–Württemberg hat eine Bevölkerung von 11 Millionen.

Während Baden–Württemberg 17,000 Menschen geimpft hat, hat Israel 1,000,000 geimpft.
Read 4 tweets
31 Dec 20
Letzte Woche erklärte @jensspahn dass in diesem Jahr 1,3 Millionen Impfdosen ausgeliefert werden.

Bisher sind laut RKI lediglich 131,626 Menschen in Deutschland geimpft worden.

Allein die Maßnahmen im März kosteten 750 Milliarden und jetzt bekommen wir es nicht hin zu impfen?
@jensspahn Israel impft mehr Menschen am Tag als Deutschland bisher geimpft hat.

Hier sind unsere Daten: ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinat…
@jensspahn Wir sind weiter im Lockdown und jeden Tag sterben Menschen während hunderttausende Impfdosen bereitstehen.
Read 4 tweets
30 Dec 20
What is going on with the vaccination campaigns?

Pfizer/Biontech said that they’d provide 50 million doses worldwide within 2020.
There are other vaccines too.

Now, one day before the end of 2020, we find in our global dataset that only 5.4 million people received a vaccine.
• More than 10,000 people die every day.
• Doctors and nurses work beyond their capacity.
• It costs us trillions, businesses are gone, millions unemployed.

Then scientists made the impossible possible and made a vaccine in 12 months.

We should really try to do this fast.
It isn’t impossible to do this rapidly.

Israel’s population receives its protection rapidly.

7.4% of Israel’s population has received the first dose.

In the US it is 0.8%
In Germany 0.09%
Read 4 tweets

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