A Modern(a) Romance Pt 2: Moderna proposes a 10-year relationship

I previously wrote about how Moderna managed to capture the heart of the Japanese government and inflame the hearts of vaccinated Japanese people.

The Japanese fail to take Moderna fully into their hearts

But now that the company and the country have been going steady for almost two years, the company has decided to propose taking the relationship to the next level.

The dowry in this case would involve Japan purchasing Moderna’s jabs at fixed periods for 10 years. That’s understandable since the indecent proposer isn’t as flush with cash as it was a year ago.

According to the Mainichi, the government sees the merit as speedy provision of vaccines when new infectious diseases start spreading and the demerit as the hundreds of billions of yen they’d have to regularly spend.

It’s nice to hear that the government is finally thinking about costs. It’d have been even nicer if they’d thought about costs before splashing out 2.3 trillion yen (approx US$18.4 billion, equivalent to the GDP of Laos) on 882 million doses to be delivered in 2021/2022: 399 million from Pfizer/BioNTech, 213 million from Moderna, 120 million from AstraZeneca, and 150 million from Novavax.

You can see why Moderna wants to spend more time with such a big spender. But the public have injected themselves with only 77.5 million Moderna doses so far, so many if not most of their jabs look destined to be left on the shelf.

For the even less popular AZ clot shot, Japan only used about 100,000 doses. The rest were donated abroad, disposed of, or cancelled, leading to the relationship ending early.

End of an affair: AstraZeneca gets no love in Japan

But Japan is unlikely to break up with Moderna in the same way. They have too many friends in common.