From "Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing"[0]

> These will be special-purpose bespoke machines, and if you ask other drug companies if they have one sitting around, the answer will be “Of course not”. This is not anything close to a traditional drug manufacturing process. And this is the single biggest reason why you cannot simply call up those “dozens” of other companies and ask them to shift their existing production over to making the mRNA vaccines. There are not dozens of companies who make DNA templates on the needed scale. There are definitely not dozens of companies who can make enough RNA. But most importantly, I believe that you can count on one hand the number of facilities who can make the critical lipid nanoparticles.

Also see this article[1] which details the supply chain of mRNA vaccines as well as the bottleneck of lipid nanoparticle assembly. These mRNA vaccines also have strict requirements for storage/distribution, preventing them from wider usage.

[0]: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

[1]: https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...

> These will be special-purpose bespoke machines, and if you ask other drug companies if they have one sitting around, the answer will be “Of course not”

I'm going to take a guess, but maybe in ten years time, the answer will be "Of course, yes".

Why wouldn't it be?

Yes, but it requires specialized machinery and ingredients which are difficult to scale on short notice.

> difficult to scale on short notice

Will it be a big deal in the long term then?

Nope, nothing particularly exotic in the raw materials. It's mostly a time issue, complex equipment can't be replicated overnight.

So, given a decade or two, "Manufacturing mRNA vaccines _will likely be_ surprisingly straightforward and widespread" ? And that will be a big deal.

Hopefully, yes. With the advances in sequencing I see a lot of potential for things like small clinics providing personalized cancer vaccines, for example.