[tass]

Doesn’t this raise the same problem with the current manufacturing process?

There was limited capacity to manufacture back then, probably less so than there is today. Which vaccine candidate would Pfizer have manufactured? All of them?

[GavinB]

Yes, all of them. Or possibly expanding capacity for each of the major vaccine types, to be ready when we know which one is the winner.

And then, yes, a lot of those factories would have ended up sold for scrap (or mothballed for future pandemics or mutations). But the few that worked then save trillions of dollars of value and hundreds of thousands of lives.

It's a simple matter of calculating expected values and investing accordingly. But thats not how our civilization works.

[natechols]

Last year Bill Gates talked about doing exactly that (I don't know if this actually happened): https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-diffe... The fact that someone like Gates is throwing the idea around suggests that it's not really incompatible or inconsistent with our civilization. (EDIT: saw your other comment with the follow-up, sigh.)

[tass]

I'm going off the assumption that the capacity has been expanding as much as possible, so scrap factories wouldn't be a problem.

The Pfizer vaccine seems to have a shelf life of 6 months, so realistically the earliest they could have begun mass manufacture and have an effect today would have been June. That's right around the time they narrowed down to a single vaccine candidate.

I'm surprised that mass manufacturing didn't begin back then with the only possible candidate, especially since the US government also put their order in around that time. I can't find a whole lot of info on when they did ramp up (something I saw said October), and what reasons they had for not starting earlier.