Quote (ofthevoid @ Apr 15 2021 11:29am)
Not in short supply but it still takes time to pump out 900 million glass vials to package vaccines. Not all glass is created equal either. I guess Corning has made some nice advancements in their Valor glass making it more durable as well as basically altering the chemistry of the glass to make whatever its holding last longer.
But like I said this is one example of many. I just knew it since I’ve been doing a lot of research on the company recently. A lot of these costs pretty much get folded under the umbrella of drug manufacturing when it comes to articles written because it’s incredibly hard to find accurate broken down accounting of how 12b was actually distributed to the granularity some people expect.
from my limited exposure in glass manufacturing, ive only done a few systems, the run rate on both low quality and high quality glass is essentially the same. however certain blends can be more expensive even if the bottles/day rate is similar. and im sure some of the materials needed for special glass were affected by COVID. just as a guess i'd be fairly shocked if they ran less than 200 bottles/minute, through molding, filling, and sealing. it's the final quality control step thats a bottle neck due to the need for individual inspection of the seal and bottle as well as things like label placement. i did a system for Astrazeneca that was an accumulating system to hold about 5,000 bottles, which takes a team of 4 workers half an hour or so to clear. about 1.5 secs / bottle to inspect and pass on. they had 10 of these systems, with the rest of production almost entirely automated, and could therefore clear 1500 or so bottles per minute on to packaging. running multiple lines they were churning out 500k doses or so per day at peak.
at the end of the day it was smart for Trump to focus on production, PR to focus on buying doses we'd have gotten anyways, and terrible messaging not telling people early and often to get it. i'd still give him a C- for his handling overall, and as Biden has messaged better but not done anything on production of his own he'd get about that as well.