For $40 billion (which we are estimated to lose every 4 or 5 days), we could have ordered 300 million of each of them.
There's likely some materials that are scarce enough not to waste (we need billions of vaccines globally), but production also seems to have started very late in the trial/approval process.
And I'd say with the exception of Sanofi/GSK's complete failure with the elderly, and AZ/Oxford's mess, we're getting about the results we should have expected. J&J's ambitious only one dose is not super good, but not bad, on the other hand it's also relatively new technology, which I'm not sure they've ever made in bulk in a hurry. Novavax's 89% is quite fine from a protein plus adjuvant vaccine (Sanofi/GSK's was the same), and uses old technology like Protein Sciences', they should be able to make it quickly, and only requires refrigeration. J&J should be about ready to make a FDA Emergency Use Authorization application, the Phase III US trials for Novavax and J&J's two dose 8 weeks apart are still in progress.
But, yes, in speed to market mRNA is new technology that's very very fast. Moderna literally developed their vaccine candidate over a weekend, although that was based on a lot of their prior work, and others in SARS like coronavirus vaccines. Whereas they had their first batch made in weeks, then had to wait a couple of weeks for the results of sterility tests.
Yes, and bulk production is a serious problem. Handling those fragile pieces of RNA, and getting them inside an encapsulation, is a very touchy process. It involves custom microfluidic components made by, apparently, only one company so far.
Remember, this is a minimum viable product. A few year from now, there will probably be regular bulk production of RNA vaccines. But this was all lab scale until recently.
Once the production problem is solved, making new vaccines will be easier. The encapsulation process doesn't much care what it's encapsulating.
But look at the distribution. Pfizer submitted their results around Thanksgiving. The FDA decided they'd look at them in a couple weeks. The Federal answer to states complaining that they didn't have funds to get programs running was "figure it out". Stupid, even if you ardently think that states should be the primary vehicle of government.
Maybe you shouldn't live in a notoriously failed state when it comes to COVID-19 management (Michigan, which outlawed the sale of garden seeds!, Vermont is the only other state to go that far), we seem to have arrived at the gravamen of your issue with not enough money being spent. My home state is doing just fine in distributing it, spent months planning and is not making excuses about not having enough money. It is calling up the National Guard now that targets of the vaccine are changing, but that was part of the plan all along. And as I previously noted, Pfizer/BioNTech approved Friday, vaccine in hand in my small city Monday morning, first front line healthcare workers vaccinated that day using one vial. Then things really got into gear.
I'm not sure who makes the allocation decision, but the slowest part of the administration here is the Federal partnership with CSV/Walgreens for long term care facilities (the state has allocated 430,000 doses, the programs have administered 100,000). Outside of the LTCF program, ~90% of doses have been administered.
There was a 2 week period where some Walmart decided they needed to close an aisle, no one got fined, no one went to jail, blah blah blah. (Garden stores were ordered closed for a time, but that's not outlawing the sale of seeds).
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BFI_WP_2...
(summary is in a table on page 6)
Operation Warp Speed worked with Moderna, spent a lot of money on both them and various parts of the supply chain to do the best to manufacture this new type vaccine as fast as possible, and I've not heard anything about their failing in their promises. Whereas Pfizer initially went it alone, and starting in December has been failing to keep their promises everywhere, now even shutting down their plant in Belgium to increase capacity.
It's very hard to evaluate whether they have proceeded on the fastest possible timeline scaling up the production. Which whether their goals were ambitious enough is just as important as whether they are hitting them.
Meanwhile in France, I can do a RT-PCR test paid by the state (around 50$ AFAIK) every other day with no question asked.
Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna.
If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 billion a month to cover furlough payments ffs...