[AKN #19] The bat shit crazy vaccine supply chain, my galaxy brain is showing, and Home Alone 3
another krappy newsletter #19
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Reporting to you from my quarantined apartment in my quarantined state. It is fun trying to come up with new and inventive ways to tell you that I am writing this edition of the newsletter from the exact same place I wrote last week’s newsletter…
Everything has been on repeat for 9 months now. Nothing distinguishes one day from another which leaves you in a perpetual state of deja vu. Part of me feels like I have written this exact same introduction to the newsletter before. Easy to go mad during these times. One day you are at a Zoom happy hour with your friends talking about how you will all get through this and the next you are bare foot sitting cross legged on a city street with your laptop open celebrating ways to energize your virtual team and remote meetings.
As I have written before, the pandemic is acting as an accelerated test of the mind for white collar workers who can do their job from home. Like me. The newfound empty space in our lives, now that we don’t need to commute or waste time with in-person office politics, allows our minds to wonder. We start to consider what is wrong or missing from their lives. Changes that would have taken years to occur have bubbled to the surface. Beginnings and endings occurring at alarming speeds.
The positive changes take the form of subtraction and addition.
Subtraction meaning:
Removing toxic things from your life like jobs or people
Leaving expensive cities
Addition meaning:
Lifestyle upgrades
New city
New job
New significant other or pet
Creation:
Taking up hobbies
Starting newsletters
Starting a new company
The negative changes take the form of consumption. It is easier than ever to find yourself falling into a shame spiral. More Netflix. More Food. More Drinking.
The ongoing quarantine battle for me has been trying to stay more on the positive side than the negative. Which is hard cause the negative is hella fun. I am all for bettering myself, but sometimes you gotta eat a bag of Doritos, drink an IPA, and watch Uhtred (son of Uhtred) walk between the worlds of the Saxons and the Danes.
I tend to follow the rule of “Everything in moderation. Especially moderation.” But during quarantine, I have been finding that I need to structure things a little bit more to not allow my worst self to win out over my best self.
Anyway.
I went on a podcast recently with Paul LeCrone. We chatted about an eclectic array of topics from how every Republican candidate has been called Hitler to the whereabouts of Demetri Martin (spoiler alert: we don’t know).
I even signed it off on a low key pseudo intellectual high note which either made me sound deep or like a total tool. Unclear. You can be the judge by checking it out here:
On to the newsletter.
Table of contents
Vaccine manufacturing
The COVID news strategy revisited
The script for Home Alone 3
1. Vaccine supply chain
It is OK to be skeptical of our ability to manufacture and distribute billions of vaccines without any issues. The vaccine supply chain is more complex than the personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chain and we royally fucked that one up 9 months ago.
I don’t understand where this new found confidence in our manufacturing sector comes from. But allow me to erode it a bit by exposing you to a bit of the wild world of vaccine supply chains.
Vaccines require a mixture of traditional manufacturing and magic. Seriously, vaccines use some of the same ingredients that witches use in their potions.
For example, normal vaccine manufacturing requires horseshoe crab blood.
Horseshoe crab blood is the only known natural source of limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) and they use LAL to test the vaccine for contamination. Analysts project that in order to make enough vaccine for COVID, we would need to deplete the world’s crab supply.
This has forced scientists to get creative. In fact, the FDA recently issued an emergency order to reconvene colleges to start working overtime on solving this problem. They are providing financial incentives for fraternities/sororities to throw parties. The idea is that after the party is over, they can go from house to house harvesting the new crabs to make up for the supply shortage.
The world will be saved by the first sexually transmitted vaccine.
Just kidding. They approved a synthetic version of LAL a couple years ago so they are actually going to use that. But this does bring up some concerns. We have never used this synthetic LAL at this scale before. In many parts of the supply chain, we are being stretched outside of our normal way of doing things. Ends up it is hard to manufacture a billion of anything.
Such as:
Vials
High level: There are not enough traditional vials to support the demand of COVID vaccines. To offset the shortage, we are using newer technology that is not as thoroughly tested.
The nitty gritty:
A drinking glass is made of soda-lime glass. If it held a more potent chemical, like a vaccine, small particles of glass would gradually leach into the liquid. This would obviously not be ideal because you are about to inject that shit in to your muscle. So when we talk about the supply chain for vials, we are talking about a highly specialized glass called borosilicate glass. This type of glass doesn’t leach into the liquid making it ideal for containing drugs and vaccines.
Schott is the world’s largest manufacturer of medical borosilicate. They make long glass tubes out of borosilicate mixes—7% to 13% boron, the rest mostly silicon dioxide—at four melting facilities: two in Germany and one each in India and Brazil.
“Around the world, roughly 25 billion injections every year—or 1,200 a second—are drawn out of vials made with our borosilicate glass,” Stöcker says. About 11 billion of these are vials made by Schott itself; the rest are made by other vial manufacturers to whom Schott sells its borosilicate tubes.
This is great! They make a ton of it and the vials are super stable as demonstrated by years of carrying previous vaccines!
All we would have to do was order these on time and….yea. Well. Unfortunately we didn’t do that. By the time the US prepared for a vaccine, all the borosilicate tubes on the global market were either sold out or spoken for.
This has lead to us “securing alternatives to the classic vial”. For example, the US partnered with SiO2 Materials Science in Auburn, Ala. which manufactures a patented vial out of plastic coated with a thin layer of glass. The US funding helped them ramp production to 120 million vials by this month.
So a large number of the vaccines will be stored in a previously untested plasticky-glass vial that will have to undergo stability testing with vaccine candidates to make certain the container and its contents don’t react with each other. I am hoping the appropriate testing is being done here to ensure that the vials are not chemically reacting poorly to any of the vaccine candidates…
Adjuvants
High level: There are not enough traditional adjuvants to support the demand of COVID vaccines. To offset the shortage, we are using newer technology that is not as thoroughly tested.
The nitty gritty:
The adjuvant is a secondary chemical that acts alongside the vaccine to provoke the right kind of immune response and ensure the response has “memory”—that it can be stirred up again even if a pathogen invades the body years down the line.
Until very recently, the new adjuvants had to be distilled from natural sources, which took time, patience, and an abundance of sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their head.
Again. Seriously. The active ingredients for some adjuvants come from:
Soapbark trees. Which grows in the mountains of Chile. Its bark has to be harvested in the southern summer, turned into a slurry, and processed before the harvest moon while Mercury is in retrograde. Most of that last sentence is true.
Shark liver oil. Which comes from sharks…it is embarrassing that I have to explain that to you.
In the words of a CEO of a biotech company, to obtain 1 billion doses of adjuvant “would take a lot of sharks, and a lot of hunting, for a long time.”
Thankfully, we again have a recently approved synthetic alternative. But do we have all the data required for how the new synthetic adjuvants react to the new vials and all of the vaccine candidates? These things normally take much longer than they are taking. That should make us pause and ask questions.
Listen. All I am saying is that it is not that weird to question the efficacy with which someone can make a billion things. That is actually a completely reasonable concern. Especially if they are using newly introduced containers, synthetic substitutes, and we need to make a meaningful dent in the horseshoe crab and shark population to get there.
Looking forward to seeing more data come out about the effectiveness of the vaccine and definitely hoping they get good at controlling contamination sources that result from the mass manufacturing process.
Sources for above:
2. The COVID news strategy
As we talked about last time, the media has over reported negative news about COVID.
But I have been thinking about the why. Why do they do that? Who benefits?
While there is a real argument about the need for these outlets to get clicks and people being naturally attracted to more negative news, the recent idea that I have come to embrace is that they do it because it distracts you from what is going wrong right now.
Warning: Galaxy brain approaching.
The goal of media is to outrage and force you to live in a perpetual now.
Or as Blake Masters wrote on the media:
The tactic of the media is a constant alternation between amnesia and serial bouts of monomaniacal hysteria. The intended result is the replacement of thinking with outrage.
Momentary outrages overwhelm long-term chronic failures -- and that is how the people responsible for failure like it.
The natural outlook of power is to see itself as timeless and lasting forever. Media hysteria works well for the powerful because it locks everyone else into an eternal present.
We see this play out non-stop. No one fact checking or questioning the groups in power because by the time we get around to critically thinking, the media has loaded up the hopper with more outrage porn to distract us.
This is very effective. Because maybe for a minute you become so outraged at Trump you forget about how ineffective our COVID response has been outside of him as well.
Maybe you forget about the:
Failure of contact tracing or documenting how people are getting the virus
Inability for us to get cheap disposable tests to quickly test people
Bipartisan Congress that has failed to provide aid to the American people for the last 6 months
Lack of data supporting the reasoning for recent state government shut downs
Last four Adam Sandler movies
They all failed. All I am saying is think about it. Ok. Turning the galaxy brain off.
3. Home Alone 3
This thread is a call to arms.
The time is now for Home Alone 3.
Read the script below:
Closing time
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