We don't have 80 years' experience making and distributing COVID vaccines, and we'll have to make 3-4x the number of doses. https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1356254549141573644

Completing vaccinations by May was not in anyone's projections. Sorry. Maybe we'll get very lucky, nobody assumed it. Maybe we should have taken the public health measures more seriously.

Mass vaccination against influenza began in the 1940s. The USA vaccinated about 160 million people against influenza in 2019, with one dose each. That vaccine needs to be refrigerated.

Influenza vaccines are produced on an annual cycle, with six months of production between agreement on the strains to include for the coming season and release to the public.

COVID-19 vaccines only started finishing their (extremely abbreviated) Phase III trials two months ago, and they have never been produced in quantity. mRNA vaccines are new technology. Most of the vaccines need two doses, so we will need about 500 million doses.

The COVID-19 vaccines need to be kept frozen or extremely frozen. The logistics are more complicated.

We all want vaccination to go faster. But this isn't comparable to annual flu vaccines.

Even on a total war footing, new equipment still takes years to design, test, manufacture, and deploy. Even in technically proficient countries spending half their GDPs on war. https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1356257689391792131?s=20

I'm on record volunteering to blowgun vaccine doses into the general public, but we do need the vaccine.

If someone can point out the specific bottlenecks where millions of doses are sitting around waiting distribution, or millions of doses' worth of manufacturing capacity is idle, that would be a public service.