The death toll mounts while non-experts try to solve the manufacturing problem.
Episode Summary:
A year into the Covid pandemic, and Western nations are finally making enough vaccines. For the rest of the world is still suffering. Why can’t anyone manufacture enough?
While the mainstream media are all over the Biden administration’s initiative to crack the intellectual-property problem and allow global pharmaceutical manufacturers to ramp up Covid 19 vaccine production, those of us in manufacturing, especially those with a sense of history, must shake our heads and wonder.
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Transcript of this week’s show:
This is a Grumman Wildcat. But it was built by General Motors. This is a Consolidated B-24 And this is a Vought Corsair, built by Goodyear. 75 years ago, when there was the national emergency called World War II, intellectual property, just called patents in those days, went out the window as federal administrations used war production boards to ensure that the maximum number of military airplanes were delivered. What mattered was which manufacturing facility was best suited to make each model airplane, not who owned the design. The originating companies were compensated, yes, but that was negotiated after the more important job of setting up production. Similarly, Ford made thousands of jeeps in World War II, and was forced to do so when Ford’s own design for a light scout car lost the original competition. Henry Ford was so furious that the company refused to call the vehicles jeeps, and four demanded that a Ford identifier be stamped into every single component in the vehicle, right down to the fasteners. But they did what they were ordered to do and built the competitors design. The total number of US dead in World War II was 405,000. In only a year, the total number of Covid dead in the US is over 580,000. Yet it has taken a year to get on top of vaccine mass production? Something went seriously wrong, and it’s not the fault of the pharmaceutical industry. No one plans for a 10 or 20 times increase in production rates, and the supply chains that those processes would take months to years to establish anyway, but in the national emergency governments could move mountains. We are on the backside of the Covid crisis now, thankfully, however I have to wonder what could have been done if governments around the world had established national priority authorization for vaccine manufacturing, right down to military transportation of feedstocks, raw materials, and capital equipment. I suspect that thousands of people could have been saved. 75 years ago, before the Internet, before the cloud, before significant transportation networks and before computers, incredibly complex products were manufactured in large volumes, quickly because of cooperation between industry and government. History is not going to look at the response to this pandemic kindly. To begin the system work requires command, control, and communications, and there has been not enough of any of those three.
