Sharpest tools, in a box: miniature vaccine factories

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In the second installment of our series on the French presidential election, we look left. The country's storied Socialist Party is in the doldrums and the field of left leaning candidates is big, too big for its own good. And as the Winter Olympics come to a close, our data team puts numbers to a problem you might have guessed. Judges favoring competitors from their own countries. We even get a sense for how many medals may have been wrongly awarded. First up though, This week a potential new chapter opened in the coronavirus vaccine tale. The lightning fast development of vaccines has played out as the science success story of the century. But this new future is not evenly distributed. Many in poor countries haven't had a single jab yet. Only about 11% of Africa's population is fully vaccinated. Now Biontech, a German company that helped develop the first widely approved vaccine, wants to put production facilities, lots of them, where they're needed.

Yesterday, Biontech unveiled a new way of making vaccines and they want to do it inside shipping containers.

Hal Hudson is our technology correspondent.

For the last eight months, they have been working on porting their manufacturing process out of their existing factories. And the idea is that once you've got the production technology working inside a container, you can ship it to anywhere in the world and spin up vaccine manufacturing capacity very, very quickly.

This is the future of manufacturing not only for Africa, but worldwide.

I've been speaking to the company's founder, Ugr Sahin, who says that they found a reliable, repeatable way to achieve what's known as good manufacturing practice inside a 14 foot metal box.

And so what did Mr. Sahin tell you about how they fit all that into a 40 foot box?

You know, the way to think about this is that inside their factories and now inside these containers, there are series and series and series of different machines and devices which do all kinds of things, mixing things together, running chemical reactions at certain temperatures and pressures over certain amounts of time. And all of the variables on all of those devices are really quite precise. The dials need to be set to exactly this setting. And what that setting is can change depending on the weather, what the atmospheric pressure is, what the temperature is outside. Think about it like if you were in a really fancy, incredibly complex, Michelin starred kitchen, you could give me the recipe for the really delicious food that they're making in that kitchen and I could say, I'm going to do this in my kitchen, but it wouldn't work. My food would not be as good because even though I have the recipe, I don't have what's called the process knowledge. I don't have what's inside the brains of those master chefs. And in speaking to Mr. Zion, he told me about just the extraordinary number of steps that are inside this crazy recipe for making the Biontech vaccines.

There are of course, a few challenges. MRNA manufacturing is straightforward, but still has about 50,000 steps.

And that's what Sahin and Biontech have been doing, transporting that process knowledge that's so important for making vaccines.

It sounds like a nearly impossible task to take this out of the sort of industrial sphere and move it to shipping containers.

Yeah, it's long and slow. And just because you can do it in one place, in one context, in one building, with one set of suppliers, doesn't necessarily mean that you can scale that production infinitely into all other kinds of environments and contexts. And sitting over all of this fiddliness is good manufacturing practice, or gmp. And these are effectively the manufacturing standards that drug makers have to adhere to if their products are going to be licensed for sale and marketing in regulated markets. And GMP is really important because it protects consumers from badly made drugs and the harm that can come from that. But the problem with it, and it is a real problem, is that it's slow. Even when a drug company is transferring its own vaccine from one of its own facilities to another of its own facilities, that takes about eight months. And as Mr. Sahin told me, this was a particular challenge in Africa.

One challenge is that on the African continent there are not much experienced GMP providers. So that's one challenge. And the second challenge is that the regulatory system which has to provide oversight and advice for GMP manufacturing, is not yet well developed.

And so finding good manufacturing practice facilities can act as a barrier.

But why specifically shipping containers? Why not just build quick, cheap, temporary facilities rather than put them in these boxes?

Yeah, the answer is standardization. Because every shipping container is the same size, height and length. And if you transform your process so it fits in one shipping container, you know, it fits in every other shipping container because they're all the same. You can clone your stuff right in there and send the shipping container anywhere. That is at least the idea. There will, of course, be wrinkles to this, and the hope is that they end up being a lot cheaper than building larger factories. Biontech is hoping that their 12 container setup, which can pump out 50 million doses a year, will come with a price tag of like less than 150 million euros, which is significantly less than the equivalent traditional factory.

So when do you think the first of these sets will be actually in use on the ground?

Mr. Sahin says that the first site will be ready in June. They will be making sure that there's enough electricity and water to the site, security, that kind of thing. And then the idea is that the first actual containers will arrive at the end of this year. The final announcement of where these containers are going to go hasn't been made yet, but Mr. Sahin says they could be operational pretty much anywhere.

It could be established on an empty field with relatively little technical requirements. That's something which is ongoing now with partner states identifying the right sites in Africa.

We don't know what that partner country will be yet. It'll be one of South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal or Ghana. And they hope to start actually producing vaccines at the end of 2023.

That's still a long time to wait for a region of the world where a lot of people are still waiting for their first shot.

Yeah, it really is. And one of the things that maybe everyone can agree on here is that it would have been better to start expanding vaccine production infrastructure in parts of the world that didn't have it at the beginning of the pandemic when rich countries were ensuring their own supply. The fact that we didn't insure everyone else's supply is coming back to bite everybody. But the other thing to bear in mind is that by the time these vaccines start being produced, pretty much everyone in those places is already going to have had Covid. So a lot of the point of this and Another reason why Mr. Sahin is keen on these containers is because the same exact infrastructure, because of the MRNA technology, can in theory be used to produce all kinds of other vaccines.

Slight protocol changes could be sufficient to make an MRNA vaccine against malaria or tuberculosis.

He's actually thinking about changing the vaccine production process for all kinds of diseases with this containerized setup.

Still, though, you've described a process that sounds extremely complicated. Where might this go wrong?

Yeah. So very important to bear in mind. This is just a plan at the moment. The containers themselves might prove to offer less uniform manufacturing environment than Mr. Sahin hopes. The regulators that they're going to work with over the course of 2023 might also find issues with the containerised production system that Biontech hasn't seen. Countries that are going to hypothetically be the hosts of these things might not like it. There's something kind of out of control about the idea that you're just going to have these containers be dropped into your country and they're going to start pumping out stuff you need, all under the control of some foreign company. And so that might be a bit of a problem. So, yeah, there's a huge amount of challenges. You're talking about fundamentally changing the way drugs are produced. But if Biontech is successful, I really do think it's likely not just to increase the vaccine manufacturing capacity for countries in Africa, but to change the way drugs are made all over the world.

Hal, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

The French are well known for their revolutionary spirit, their workers unions, their many, many protests. The country's relationship with socialist and communist ideas has deep roots. The Socialist Party has provided two Francois Mitterrand.

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And Francois Hollande vid. It's been the source of landmark social legislation, including the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 and the legalization of gay marriage in 2013.

Two men have become the first gay couple to legally marry in France, just days after President Francois Hollande signed the same Sex marriage bill into law.

But in the intervening years, the left has been left behind by voters. In the second installment of our series, we're asking how that will play out in France's coming presidential election.

The left is in a dismal state. There is no candidate on the left in France for this election that looks like coming anywhere close to qualifying for the second round.

Sophie Petter is our Perth bureau chief.

There are too many of them and not a single one is managing to impose him or herself as a forceful presence to attract the votes on the left.

Who are the candidates on the left? There being too many of them?

Well, the Socialist Party's candidate is Anne Hidalgo, who's fairly well known abroad because she's the mayor of Paris. She's doing pretty dismally in the polls. There's the Green Party candidate, that's Yannick Jadot.

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Pu Sime, who ran in 2017 at the last election, but stood down in the end in favor of the Socialist candidate. But this time he looks like he's going to go all the way and he also is doing pretty dismally. The candidate who has emerged most recently is Christian Tobiran, Who is an old timer, former Justice Minister and who emerged in the race really at the last moment. And then there are a clutch of other candidates on the hard left. Among them Jean Luc Melanchon, Who is a 70 year old firebrand on his third presidential election campaign. And he is in a way the one that's best placed at the moment. But that's not saying much.

So you say essentially each of those candidates is doing abysmally in the polls. Why do you suppose that is?

I think that the French left has become disconnected from the blue collar working class vote. That was what Francois Mitterrand did so cleverly when he managed to blend sort of the urban public sector vote with the working class vote. But these days that vote now goes to Marine Le Pen. She is thought of as being on the far right, but she actually scoops up a lot of the blue collar vote. 33% of blue collar workers back her for president, but only 3% of them back Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist candidate. And I think that this disconnection is really what explains the failure of the candidates on the left to secure enough.

Support with that much evidence. Support for Marine Le Pen, a fairly hard right figure. It sort of suggests that the median voter has kind of marched to the right.

I think that's right. If you look today at polls, you find that 37% of voters say they're on the right now and that's 4 points higher than it was in 2017, and only 20% of them say they're on the left. So we have seen a shift in the structure of French politics. Some people blame Emmanuel Macron for that because he created this big centrist party and stole from both the left and the right. And in a way, it sort of realigned French politics, and that has crushed a lot of the former Socialist Party. And I think what we've seen at the same time is the emergence of identity politics in France in a very strong way. We've got two candidates here on the far right who are trying to frame the debate around immigration and Islam. And that has also contributed, I think, to building a campaign that is really about the right and not this year about the left.

And it is kind of becoming crunch time ahead of the French election. Do you think there's any hope that the left could be revived, that these poll numbers might rise?

Well, there was an effort to try and save the left when a citizens group organized a people's primary. The point of this people's primary, of course, was to try and ensure that only one candidate would emerge and the others would then drop out. 400,000 people actually took part, and the person that they designated was Christian Tuberin. But because this was not a formal process that was agreed on by the candidates, none of them actually then stood down.

But is this fragmentation the left's biggest problem, really? It seems like there are bigger forces at work.

Well, it's going to stop them getting into the second round, but I think there's a bigger problem, and that is that all this squabbling among candidates and attempts to try and find a way forward has eclipsed any serious, proper debate about what the left stands for. Now, there are plenty of issues that are a problem in France, whether it's about integrating minorities or curbing inequality, or even recent issues like how to protect the poor from the burdens of the green transition at a time when public spending has reached an exceptional level because of the pandemic. So these are big questions for social democrats across Europe and certainly in France, but they're not the ones that are being grappled with at the moment by the French left. So I think if the left has a future in France, its candidates are doing a very good job of disguising it.

Thanks very much for joining us, Sophie.

Thank you, Jason.

We'll turn our attention back to France in two weeks for the third episode of our series. You can find all our French election coverage online@exterator.com France2022. The Winter Olympics will draw to a close on Sunday and despite very few in person spectators, they've been quite the spectacle.

Olympic skier Eileen Gu has become China's golden girl.

We've seen some amazing records being set in speed skating, figure skating, short track, speed skating, freestyle. It's now been confirmed that Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned substance before the Games started.

One thing you might have missed was the celebrated return of a figure skating judge.

Well, it's rare for sports judges rather than athletes to receive applause.

James Frensham is a data correspondent for the Economist.

But that's reportedly what happened to Huang Feng, a Chinese figure skating judge at this year's Winter Olympics in Beijing. He was banned for a year after the 2018 Olympics in South Korea for showing clear bias towards Chinese skaters during the Games.

But the whole idea of being a judge or a referee in pretty much any sport is to keep the bias out, right?

Yes, but that's unfortunately not always what happens. Take ski jumping, Jason. Imagine hurtling yourself down a slope on skis for 100 meters, then running out of ground. You must jump into the frigid air, glide at a speed of about 100 km h for five seconds before somehow landing gracefully 100 metres downhill and it's not over. Then at the bottom of the slope sit the five judges who each independently score the jump from 0 to 20.

And what's the judge's job there? They're not just judging on distance.

No, there's a bit more to ski jumping than just the distance alone. And whilst the distance is measured, so that's a very objective measure, which makes up about 3/5 of a skier's points. The remaining points come from the subjective view of the judges. Each judge independently scores the jump on how stylish it looks. The best and the worst scores of the five judges are discarded, leaving three judges scores a total of 60 points up for grabs. And so the panel of the five judges, they're all from different nationalities, but as former ski jumpers themselves, many frequently share the same nationality as the person they're judging. And what the evidence suggests is that judges show favoritism towards their compatriot ski jumpers.

When you say the evidence suggests, what evidence are we talking about?

An academic from Maldives University College in Norway, along with two co authors, has been looking at bias in ski jumping for some time. And his name is Alex Krumer. And his latest paper, published last year, examined 15,000 ski jumps in men's competitions between 2010 and 2017. And after controlling for a bunch of factors such as the leniency of individual judges and the quality of ski jumpers, the academics found that nationalistic bias among ski jump judges was modest but pretty widespread. Nearly half of judges favoured compatriots in a way that was statistically significant. And the average overall bias in ski jump competitions was an additional 0.1 point for a compatriot jumper.

And you say that's an average. What is it?

A breakout like so the original study only included the 2014 Olympics. So what we did was to augment the data by downloading all the results for the 2010 and 2018 Olympics and replicated the original model, we found that the average bias nearly doubled to 0.18 additional points during the Olympic Games.

But what's behind that average? Who are the most and least biased countries in there?

Yeah, so the bias does vary quite a lot by country. So the Russian judges were found to be the most biased, effectively. So they award an additional 0.2 points on average to their compatriot jumpers. The Polish and the French judges are kind of in the middle of the pack. And then the typical Norwegian or Finnish judge basically demonstrate no detectable bias. So basically no additional points to their compatriot jumpers. What the authors demonstrated then actually was that the bias of a country ski jumping judge on average is correlated to that of a country's overall level of corruption, as measured by Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. So the level of corruption basically broadly tallies to that of the level of favouritism by ski jumping judges.

Is this enough of an effect that perhaps it's affecting the overall outcomes of Olympic contests?

Yeah, well, thankfully, because the highest and lowest judges scores are discarded, the effects of kind of individual patriotic bias usually do not make their way into the final three scores. The most egregiously large score is removed. So that in theory removes any incentive for individual judges to try and really affect the competition. But that said, what we did was to run a counterfactual analysis of the 203 competitions removing individual judges favouritism. After we did that, we found that perhaps 14 podium positions, 2% or so, would have changed hands in the absence of any bias.

And can this be seen in other sports or is it most obvious just in ski jumping?

So ski jumping isn't the most egregious sport. It has been demonstrated that in ice skating the effect of judges bias is nearly twice that, about 60% or so higher than that of ski jumping judges. But it's not just in the Olympics. The NBA has had a problem with judges, too. A paper first published in 2007 found that referees called fewer fouls against players of their own race. But it's not all bad news, thankfully, because after widespread media attention of that paper, the NBA changed its policies for reviewing contested calls, and the effect basically diminished to zero.

Thanks very much for joining us, James.

My pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.