The US didn't spend significantly more than Europe, nor did the UK, but both did so a bit earlier and with more nationalistic approaches. Due to the production ramp this leads to 2-4 months delay for Europe. Still better than Canada or Mexico.
That German Biontech was allowed to partner with Pfizer will probably have cost 100000 European lives at the end, while saving 200000 American ones.
Which if you look at the economic damage of a lockdown, either price is laughably cheap. Like this is a multi-trillion dollar economic event, spending even 10x that much would still likely be a "deal".
Agree. I think a fair approach rather than targeting price would have been to pre-allocate a percent of the economic impact of the lockdown.
If pandemic lockdowns cost about 10% of annual GDP, then pre-allocating 1% of GDP to vaccines seems pretty conservative if anything. That means something like $100-200 billion for the US or EU.
The EU should have just pre-allocated $100 billion on vaccines. That would have been enough to secure every adult a vaccine from the big four manufacturers, plus leave a big pot of money leftover for contingencies.
Note you don't even need the "lockdown" for the economic damage, it will happen anyway. People don't want to go to restaurants if it's going to kill their grandma.
The lockdown is actually merciful for many businesses; it's cheaper to close a restaurant entirely than run it at 50% capacity, and it's the only way conventions and other events can get out of their contracts with their venues.
> By comparing counties with and without restrictions, the researchers conclude that only 7 percentage points of the 60 percentage point overall decline in business activity can be attributed to legal restrictions. Most of the decline resulted from consumers voluntarily choosing to avoid stores and restaurants.
Even if this lockdown fan favorite is correct it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is that one country is done vaccinating earlier than another and being done earlier is cheaper than being done later.
The article says 10bn was the budget of project Warpspeed not the spend. I also would call into doubt the 3.2bn figure. The UK alone spent 2.9bn pounds on vaccines.
That NPR article proceeds on the very unlikely assumption that unused vaccines will not be reallocated to other countries.
It's also hard to really judge the potential other scenarios in the overall situation; the US production ramp up is going to benefit everyone in the medium term, and it's not really clear that it would have been much different if BioNTech partnered with a different manufacturer (much of the work in the US is being done at purpose built contract manufacturer facilities; AstraZenaca and J&J share some sites...).
Edit: There's also the question of whether potential partners were really interchangeable, or if Pfizer has some advantage in knowledge or whatever.
That German Biontech was allowed to partner with Pfizer will probably have cost 100000 European lives at the end, while saving 200000 American ones.