US has 2 Million Doses of an Unproven COVID-19 Vaccine? Ready to Ship?

2 million doses of an unproven vaccine? Ready to ship?

Which one?

Only Moderna has completed Phase 1 and others are preclinical.

There are several companies in the race including Regeneron pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, VIR and Pfizer. We need more than one company to succeed.

The largest challenge will be the S&OP that will resolve the problem of Production and distribution of the vaccine throughout the globe.

The demand is going to be massive since everyone will be in line to get vaccinated. They lived through the pandemic and they have experienced the lockdown. Almost no one will say no to the vaccine.

Cost is not going be an issue since governments will subsidize this massively. Charities like the Gates Foundation will help those poor countries in need.  So demand is neither a problem nor uncertain.  

So here is an easy demand forecast in my entire forecasting career:

The demand for the Covid19 vaccine will be 6 Billion doses in the first six months. So we should estimate about 12B doses a year!

There are two questions:

1.  Are we close to a vaccine?  If so, when will the first vaccine be ready?

2.  Are we ready to supply something like two to three billion doses in a couple of months?  

The statement that two million ready to go is puzzling.   This is a pittance when you have 340 million waiting for a vaccine in America alone.  If all you have two million doses, then who gets these doses?  This means just one out of 200 Americans will win the vaccine lottery.  

Let us hope that the Government statisticians who provided this number made a mistake.  

We need to think BIG.  we need to be able to ship 500 million out of the gate and soon many million doses ready to go.  

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/06/05/trump-says-us-has-2-million-coronavirus-vaccine-does-ready-to-go.html

Let us hope the vaccines succeed.  Even if one or two achieve this soon, they should be ready to license this to others to produce in massive quantities.  

This is not a race to make profits - this is a race to save the civilization as we know it.