Sure but this is about the USA government getting more involved in industry and they did that with Moderna and OWS. We already know that the German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government but at least we might have a chance to catch up.

I'm German and thanks for the compliment but I think you can give the US government, or particular agencies some credit as well.

The German government, public research sector and so forth work really well with industry and the Mittelstand, but our digital infrastructure is well.. not great. France is much stronger in the aeronautic/space sector which I always find a little bit embarrassing, and I'd be surprised if you see a German governmental institution produce something as relatively modest as Ghidra.

While US/UK intelligence seems to attract quite a lot of talent over here it's generally considered a pretty bottom of the barrel career path.

> German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government

Debatable, Germany is notorious[1] for its bureaucracy still.

[1] https://m.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787

Pfizer took $2 billion in Warp Speed money. They declined the initial research funds from the US government, instead taking like $440 million from the German government.

The $2 billion was part of the manufacturing half of Warp Speed.

No.

A $2 billion contract for 600 million doses of a vaccine if they got it through FDA are orders, not funding.

They didn't receive the money in advance either.

It was 100 million doses, but that's a minor point.

The orders were through OWS. The best part was OWS that they would spend billions on hundreds of millions of doses even if the vaccines didn't work or had side effects. They could start production knowing they sell even if they made people grow gills. The US government also agreed not to ship the doses to other countries that might not fully indemnify Pfizer from any side effects that might occur like the US did. This is the part that's different, where normally the US government doesn't buy snake oil, insisting on seeing it works first.

Fortunately, the vaccines worked and are safe, so that's good. For some reason, I need to explicitly state this every fucking time vaccines come up because idiots keep insisting the opposite.

And "not receiving the money in advance" is pretty meaningless. If I have a guarantee the US government will give me $2 billion in 6 months, it should be trivial to debt-finance anything I need. Even if Pfizer didn't have the capital to do so internally.

Look, there were a lot of dumb things done by the US, especially by the executive branch, 2017-2021. This was not one of them. There were other parts of OWS that were stupid. But one of the best (if easiest) decisions was writing giant checks to pharma companies.

Ok. 500 million optional, correct. But it's at ~20$ / vaccine which is the sale price.

FDA requirement was valid for all the contract.

> 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 big giant checks also was not the best decision for other countries. But it was for the US.

By comparison, Israel paid 30$ and could vaccinate the population even faster.

To be fair the Moderna vaccine has been shown to have the highest efficacy,[1] but not by much. Definitely data that should be incorporated into the next run, especially considering that the red tape doesn’t seem to have lowered vaccine hesitancy in the U.S.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine/comp...

The point of OWS wasn't to fund the vaccine that was going to have the best effects. The point was to fund production of N different vaccines before the efficacy results came in, so one would be ready if it was efficacious, because the potential time saved was worth the extra expense even if the backup vaccine failed. If it was the best that is pure coincidence.

Or to put in terms HN'ers are more likely to be familiar with: OWS was a wide-scale speculative execution exercise.

Run everything in parallel, or at least start as early as possible, and be willing to discard the results of potentially dozens of paths that did not lead to an acceptable solution.

Programs can have effects that aren’t intended. My point is that the scattershot funding approach did result in the most efficacious vaccine, moreso than alternative more limited (for various reasons) funding efforts. I’m not so sure data exists to say that was a coincidence. The weakness IMO is that the funding and cooperation wasn’t even more broad, including the WHO and other international organizations, but that makes sense giving the political climate at the time.

There were other vaccine development efforts in Germany besides BioNTech too, most notably CureVac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CureVac#Reports_of_Trump_admin...), which made headlines early on in the pandemic because it was rumored that the Trump administration tried to get exclusive or prioritary rights to its vaccine for the US. Guess Trump is now glad he didn't go through with that, because the vaccine came very late and had disappointing efficacy numbers...

In fact the mRNA vaccines that are current heroes were way down on the list of ones anyone expected to work. They had only a small amount of experience compared to other ways to make a vaccine that had been used for years. However we made a big bet on them. Sort of like going to the casino and betting on every number at the same time just to say you were a winner.. very inefficient use of money, but the goal of winning was important.

Operation Warp Speed gave equally huge sums of money for each of: mRNA vaccines, adenovirus vector vaccines, and the more traditional protein adjuvant vaccines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...

Adenovirus vector vaccines are also very new technology: First one was approved only in 2019, an ebola vaccine.

> To be fair the Moderna vaccine has been shown to have the highest efficacy

Pfizer-BioNTech: 30µg doses, 21 days apart.

Moderna: 100µg doses, 28 days apart.

It seems probable that Moderna has higher efficacy because the dose is larger, or because the doses are given with a longer time interval, or both. And not that the Moderna vaccine is any kind of biochemically superior.

If you were to give Pfizer-BioNTech in 100µg doses, 28 days apart, maybe it would be just as effective as Moderna?

That could be pure luck.