Vaccine development takes time.
is the question I keep hearing.
Personally, I wouldnt say that.
It truly does not seem that corners have been cut.
Lets break down some of the steps in the vaccines development so we can see where the time went.
The advantages I describe here also benefited many of the other vaccine candidates, both here and abroad.
SARS was also sparked by a coronavirus.
The SARS outbreak spurred research on deadly, contagious coronaviruses.
Another illness in this family,MERS, popped up in the Middle East in 2012.
Basic molecular biology research has also become more advanced over the years.
But researchers didnt build the technology from scratch this year.
Chemically modifying the mRNA and encasing it in tiny bubbles made it safe.
Even then, this way of developing vaccines was praised for its capacity for rapid development.
Knowing how to build a giventypeof vaccine can really accelerate building the actual vaccine.
Every years flu shot is different from the year before, but its not built from scratch.
Remember how the viruss genome was published in January?
Huge amounts of money poured in, from various countries governments and from other funding bodies and donors.
Everyone was ready to get shit done.
Once a trial has the green light, you have to recruit volunteers.
In ordinary times, a vaccine would have taken months to years to get through all this red tape.
But this aspect of the timeline is something that people can accelerate just by wanting to.
The FDA, for example, aims to process most applications for a new drug or vaccinewithin 10 months.
Expedited review is six months.
But for the first COVID vaccine?
They called an emergency meeting and were ready to approve it withinthree weeks.
The trials do not intentionally expose people to the virus; thats considered unethical.
So all you have to do is vaccinate half your participants, and then wait.
Cases quickly accumulated, and the study could be ended and results analyzed sooner than anyone had predicted.
But here, everything happened at once.
The vaccine companies began manufacturing doses as fast as they could, even before trials were finished.
Does COVID pose enough of a risk to the American population that a vaccine is worthwhile at all?
On what basis should groups of people be prioritized?
(They have a whole framework that balances science, ethics, and practicality.)
But its difficult to separate the politics of a pandemic from the science of it.
Imagine a less-deadly COVID; a common cold, perhaps.
And so thats where we are.
The vaccine looks safe and effective, so far.
