Pfizer had multiple manufacturing processes in multiple parts of the world. The EU plants definitely did worse than the US plants. That's probably not due to any government program, but the US based manufacture didn't have to shutdown and restart or waste, I think it was a month.
That said, the primary reason OWS worked at all is they parallelized anything they could. In this case, they paid Pfizer $2 billion to start producing a vaccine before they knew if it would work or be FDA approved, although there was good reason to believe it would.
It wasn't brilliant. It was a good idea. Worst cast we waste $2 billion. Best case we end a pandemic 6 months early.
Putting more money at risk for faster results is reasonable in emergencies. Outside emergencies we have a process for a reason - to reduce waste and fraud.
What's the source of a month shutdown? I've never heard of that.
Pfizer, additionally, already had positive trials before the order from the US came! OWS had nothing to do with the quickest delivered vaccine, since Pfizer wanted NO political interference.
The contract was not funding at all. They didn't receive the money upfront and it had to be approved by FDA before the contract was considered valid.
Israel had the fastest vaccination rate/program in the world and it was supplied by the Belgian manufacturing part of Pfizer in Puurs.
> Most vaccination technologies have been initiated or developed in Europe. Most of the doses with which Israel embarked on its mass vaccination programme were sent from Belgium.
There's a big difference in supplying the world with enough vaccines ( EU ) versus buying all available ones at a premium ( US).
I don't even know where your fraud argument comes from...
It was in late January/early February of 2021 that the Purus plant shut down. I mean, it did that to upgrade the plant, and it caught back up later in 2021. And they fell behind schedule getting Marburg online in early 2021. So they had to rely on precursors shipping from Missouri during that time.
I tried to find a link, but it's non-trivial.
Not that it matters. The random distribution of plants in the US and EU and the easy of converting them over is not really that significant.
Israel had the faster vaccination rate because the government (cleverly) offered to turn the entire country into a sales/research tool and promised a ton of data transparency back to Pfizer. It's how some new variants moving through vaccinated populations get modeled.
The contract was purchasing the doses even if the FDA didn't approve them. Even if they made people frog people, the US government would pay Pfizer. They did turn down the US research money, but instead took money from Germany and China (technically, a "totally independent* Chinese company). And they walked back the "never took OWS money" line.
I'm not sure why "money up front" matters. If the US government commits to buy 100 million things from you for $2billion, it's trivial to get external or internal financing.
I was saying the worst case from writing a check to Pfizer was 2 billion.
> a 10 billion $ risk of funds taken from hospitals for COVID care that could need it, which paid for "operation Warp speed"
Look, the fact that instead of getting Congress to authorize additional money (which they would have) and instead proceeded to waste a bunch, try to (successfully?) skim off some for themselves and then fail at most administrative tasks because they tried to work around instead of through the bureaucracy was really bad. Buying vaccines of unknown quality in massive quantities was a good, if obvious, idea.
> I don't even know where your fraud argument comes from
Oh, it's a minor point. Most US regulations around contracts specify that the existence of the regulation is to prevent "waste, fraud or abuse". My only point is that, in an emergency, optimizing for reducing those over saving lives is a bad idea. Of course, we hope that we go back and prosecute those engaging in them after the fact.
They did manufacturer outside the US just fine. A simple Google search could have given that info.