[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/can-multibillion-dol...
I have mentioned it elsewhere on HN, but I've handle dry ice and liquid nitrogen quite a bit, first in college and then just later for fun. Several years back, I noticed a very large price hike in dry ice, as well as a drop in availability (less available in my city, vanishing from small towns). I was told by someone in my supply chain that federal regulations around dry ice had changed, resulting in only a few players being left in the game and of course the price going up.
I wonder if now, a decade or so later, the law of unindented consequences has reared its often invisible head.
This NPR All Things Considered clip made me wonder if dry ice might be more complicated than I thought: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/950102003/does-u-s-have-enoug... Note how the interviewee's business is located in Miami but the dry ice comes from Georgia. Surely a populous state like Florida has local dry ice production?
Also, fun fact: "[Fearing a dry ice shortage,] the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association sent a letter to state and federal officials asking that 350,000 pounds of dry ice a week be set aside." Source: https://www.cbs58.com/news/cheese-industry-threatened-by-cov...
You're right in that it was once ubiquitous but it has grown steadily less so.
As the article is mainly describing the supply chain, I'd like to add some of the challenges, especially downstream / last mile. The Biontech vaccine seems to be a royal pain to distribute. Cold chains are tricky to maintain, let alone at -70 C. Having doses packed in numbers larger than one makes it challenging to vaccinate people at the centers, the unfreezing takes some time, and the vaccine cannot be stored eternally once unfrozen. So you have to closely schedule appointments with the treatment of the vaccine itself for batches of people. Which cannot be allowed to wait in line because of COVID-19. It also means that existing infrastructure, doctors and care and nursing services, cannot be used to get the Biontech vaccine to the people. Yet another pain.
At yet, we are only discussing the purchased doses. Not even the delivery schedules, just the total quantity. As if that was the real bottle neck right now.
The politicians are busy blaming each other, and the news people are busy looking for bullshit scoops.
I think you're actually correct. If the lunacy of modern society helped it succeed vs genetically similar organisms I would call that a successful adaptation.
While I do appreciate how difficult it is to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at -70 C, I am still puzzled by how deep into the distribution this temperature gets maintained. As far as I know, the spec is that the vaccine can be stored (and transported) at regular fridge temperatures for up to 5 days. It seems like everyone (in the US anyway) is focused on maintaining -70C all the way to the point of use. What about the alternative of thawing it at some distribution center and focusing efforts on getting it into a person within five days after that?
EDIT: This really is frustrating. Either I am unable to google stuff or there really is no data sheet on the Biontech vaccine available online. All I found is nice pictures and text without numbers at Pfizer's website and second hand interviews of Biontech CFO saying the vaccine can be stored up to 5 days in a fridge. Real transparency doesn't seem to be a thing with everything Covid-19.
So why is the -70c an issue at all? It seems totally reasonable that we could just ship it at refrigerated temp and it would all be used up well before the 30 day expiration.
The only explanation I can think of is that the information I read was wrong and it won't keep that long after thawing.
There are vaccines that are more shelf-stable in development. Merck is working on a pill version. All those features add to development time. The whole clinical testing process has to be re-run for each modification to the delivery chemistry.
A year or two downstream, there will be plenty of supply, competing vendors, fewer side effects, and greater ease of use. But we need something now, so the working prototype had to be manufactured.
A pill version, or just one general doctors practices can store and handle, will have a huge impact IMHO.
Storage requirements? Not essential. Prepackaged syringes? Not essential. I'd bet they are now working on those aspects but went to grab a huge part of the market with their MVP.
It would be grand if this spirit continues and provides a model for the other sciences. I would like to think this is a potential silver lining that could have wonderful consequences.
It is not possible to grow chicken eggs faster. So it's been impossible to have anything less than a years lead time to get flu vaccines made in sufficient quantities.
Planet money even did a show on the emergency chickens [1] (have they been called into service already ?). So we have the chickens, but no COVID vaccine that can be grown in eggs.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th...
Some vaccines are grown in HEK 293 cells. HEK 293 is a cell line taken from an aborted fetus. (HEK -> Human Embryonic Kidney). Many people consider vaccines grown in HEK 293 to be immoral. Chicken eggs are a moral alternative medium.
It doesn't necessarily apply in this case because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was only tested on HEK 293, not grown in it. (Moderna's vaccine, conversely, was grown in HEK 293.) Some people still consider the testing to be immoral. Some don't.
> I’ll start with the bad news: Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon.
... We're not there in time for COVID19, but technologically, I think we're less far away than this article presumes. Cost of both sequencing and synthesis has been dropping like a rock, albeit not very smoothly. I can get DNA synthesized for less than what I was paying for amateur PCBs as an undergrad.
A lot of the other complexity, I suspect, is specific to getting this out in <1 year. It's worth remembering the earliest vaccines took no technology beyond what I have in my garage. With a little more time and patience, I'm sure some of the other complexity will go down. We can't spare time and patience when we're bleeding billions of dollars from our economy and thousands of lives each day, but....
There was actually a video on YouTube a few months ago about some biohackers, Josiah Zayner and others, who made a DNA COVID vaccine in their garages, and it actually worked. Granted it wasn't mRNA, but very similar.
We have all these high tech stuff, $50k a gram chemicals, custom built machines, DNA printers and nano-scale technologies producing a substance where every atom is at the right place.
And all that is produced at a scale where we are limited by glass vials. That's literally ancient technology, and commodity stuff. Ok, it is a bit fancier than what the Romans had, but these are still just glass bottles.
The glass vial part is expected, things get complicated when multiplied by a billion, but it gives a sense of how much vaccine is being produced and how fast it is done.
Are the doses being distributed produced on the same line with the same procedure as the doses in the trials?
The idea that there are significant side effects that have failed to surface makes zero sense.
Anyone else find that really refreshing?
VaxMod? I have no ideas :(
Spectre is better than something like "Novel data exfiltration from branch prediction using a cache side-channel, variant 3" or similar.
they'll probably conform to the drugs themselves having brand names eventually like the rest of the industry
I wonder if it made a difference? Does anyone know more how his plan turned out?
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/9/21210250/coronavirus-bil...
He certainly put money towards COVID, but it’s unclear to me if the factory building idea went anywhere.
Moderna has 100mg per dose and standard freezer storage
Pfizer has 30mg per dose and extreme cold chain storage.
Seems like there's more potential for Pfizer to spoil along logistics chain.
