My point is the rate of growth rather than the baseline, were these vaccines you mention available in 1700? To the general poorer population? Highly unlikely.
I stand corrected. Wikipedia lists some interesting proto-vaccines in the 1800s and earlier (including one for smallpox). There was a major increase in the availability and breadth of vaccines in the 1900s, but a lot of groundwork was already laid before that. Thanks for the correction.
Nice summary. Also explains why sputnik the vaccine from Russia was developed so quickly and was effective. Traditional vaccines work.
As for why they stifled production and roll out is another matter entirely, maybe mass production was difficult/expensive when there is a mad dash for reagents.
I'm not making a statement on it being better or lasting longer and in all honesty there is little data to prove that one way or the other.
The economics will be different (more interesting/tempting) indeed. The point of the anecdote was that vaccine fabrication has been understood for a long time in the context of the scale it's required (again, the case was from the 50s-60s). I don't think any of the "promising vaccines" that are being tested now would fall in the trap of such a production scaling problem. Labs know this will be demanded in the billions.
The mRNA vaccines were approved back in December and yet six months later they've only made enough doses for a couple hundred million people. What evidence do you have that a "war time like effort" could have ramped up production wildly faster than what they achieved? It isn't like there are any unused vaccine factories or production machines just lying around, and there'd certainly be no shortage of eager investors fund increasing capacity faster if that was possible
Vaccines are sufficiently easy to make that people in the 19th century could make them.
The hard part isn't making a vaccine, it's making one that's safe and reliably effective. Using 19th century techniques will kill you an unacceptably high proportion of the time (well, unacceptable unless it's something like widespread smallpox or, debateably, covid) and also often won't work.
It did, it just wasn't ambitious enough. There were separate grants, but the preorders were only enough to cover the entire population if multiple vaccines were approved.
I guess it is possible that production was scaled up as fast as possible, but it seems that there was a lack of imagination in the planning process (setting low goals, not anticipating far enough ahead, etc).
The vaccine had been invented more than 100 years prior to 1900. I'm not sure how wide-spread they were at that point, but the vaccine was invented some time in the 18th century. Antibiotics -- you're right, not discovered yet in 1900.
How long ago was that? I have to think the situation today is quite different from when the major vaccines were approved months ago, but I could be wrong.
Agreed, we’ve never produced a vaccine of this type at scale nor managed the required supply chain considerations. Making 10K efficacious non-harmful vaccines for a trial may be much easier than making 100M or 1B. Some processes don’t scale easily.
reply