Thread by @doctorow

#Pluralistic is my mutli-channel publishing effort - a project to push the limits of #POSSE (post own site, share everywhere) that allows me to maintain control over my work while still meeting my audience where they are, on platforms whose scale makes them hard to rely on.

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Every day, I write 1-5 essays and syndicate them over Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon and email, with the canonical link at pluralistic.net, a CC-BY licensed Wordpress site with no tracking, data-collection or ads.

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Now, I've added another channel: @Medium, where I'm part of a group of paid writers who contribute a mix of original material that's exclusive to the platform and syndicated material from elsewhere.

doctorow.medium.com

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I was delighted and honored to be invited to the program by editorial director @Jon_Gluck and I'm happy to be working with @meganmorrone - whom I've known since her @TWiT days - as my editor. I've been syndicating my Pluralistic posts there and it's been going great.

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Yesterday, I published my first Medium-original post: "Manufacturing mRNA vaccines is surprisingly straightforward (despite what Bill Gates thinks)," which discusses #VaccineApartheid and the covid vaccine patent exemption petition at the WTO.

doctorow.medium.com/manufacturing-…

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The post breaks down an amazing scholarly article on mRNA vaccine manufacture, “Rapid development and deployment of high‐volume vaccines for pandemic response” (DOI: 10.1002.amp2.10060), from the Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing.

aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

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The authors - a mix of public health, chemical engineering and vaccine specialists from @imperialcollege and the @IAVI - describe the results of their modeling of new mRNA vaccine factories, based on the experience of ramping up covid vaccine facilities.

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They base their findings - contrasting mRNA vaccine production with conventional vaccine production - on an open-access Superpro Designer model (available at @github).

These.

Findings.

Are.

Amazing.

github.com/ZKis-ZK/RNA-va…

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Seriously. Like Clarke's Third Law/indistinguishable from magic Amazing. How amazing? Well. compared to conventional vaccine production, mRNA factories are:

* 99 - 99.9% smaller
* 95 - 99.7% cheaper
* 1,000% faster

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If you convert a single closet in a conventional factory to mRNA production, it will make more doses than the rest of the factory COMBINED. Only part of the factory needs to be a high-spec cleanroom facility, and the rest can be cheaper and more easily maintained.

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Spend $20m to build one of these microfactories, install a 5l bioreactor, and, for $100m/year, it will produce ONE BILLION VACCINE DOSES.

As I wrote in my Medium piece:

> JESUS FUCKING HOLY GODDAMNED SHITBALLS

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These aren't performance gains in GPUs or SSDs. These are gains in nanoscale chemistry producing precision medicine for human consumption!

Now, that said, there are some caveats. You still have to figure out testing, materials and distribution (of course).

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But even there, it's easy to see how these vast reductions in cost, scaling and logistics will help - from producing medicines for trials more quickly to reducing cold-chain logistics by making vaccines closer to the people who will receive them.

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Every pandemic ends with a lot of serious chin-stroking and demands to "learn some lessons" and "prepare for the next one," but this never seems to happen.

wired.com/story/its-alre…

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As the JAMP authors say, the next pandemic - or even epidemic - will require a very fast rampup of vaccine production, as will any vaccine breakthroughs for treating current endemic viruses.

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The production modeling they do here suggests that we actually can prepare for The Next One.

And as I say in my Medium piece, this is also how we can end the current vaccine apartheid and avert the next one.

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/cla…

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