Curious why you say 18 months at the earliest for a vaccine. Is this a standard vaccine timeline? Are we guaranteed to be able to make a vaccine for this virus? I am not at all educated on how vaccines are developed.
Building out the capacity to manufacture and distribute ten billion doses of new vaccines as quickly as we can validate their safety and efficacy would also be quite the feat.
It's nice for a first-world citizen that we were getting vaccinated against a new disease 12-18 months after it was first discovered, but with a big enough supply chain we could potentially be aiming to finish a world-wide vaccination campaign in 6-12 months, before we begin running up against the limits of our current methodologies for clinical trials.
"Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine."
That makes a lot of sense for a vaccine against, say, chickenpox, or anything else that kills a hundred or a thousand people a year. For something that, at a 3% fatality rate, is about to kill nine million people in this country alone, it's suicidally slow.
Interesting, I wonder if when we're developing the vaccine, ability to easily mass produce the vaccine is a factor... I imagine the biggest issue once we have a vaccine is going to be how to get it out to everyone quickly enough... like I can see critical care workers and then maybe elderly and it being this really long time before it can be available to everyone... or do you start mass production of the vaccine and avoid distribution until you have enough to get everyone vaccinated so that you have the protection period of 3-4 months? Interesting to think it's not just the science of the vaccine but also the application of the vaccine that can be a factor... In the meantime it's promising that we're also learning how to treat the infection better and better...
The WHO is saying a vaccine is 18 months out, and I’m very curious what that means. I haven’t seen any detail as to why it takes that long.
It’s short enough that clearly they expect it won’t be very hard, like no one would say a general cure for cancer is 18 months out. So what is preventing us from speeding it up more? Why can’t it be made in 6 months, or 3 months? Is the majority of that 18 months a basic r&d phase of figuring out what will work? If so, why can’t it be parallelized and sped up with more resources? Is it time for clinical trials? To ramp up manufacturing? I can’t help thinking that for a disease that prevents such a big risk to society, there must be clever ways to speed up the normal process for this kind of thing, perhaps with some government involvement in funding or coordinating efforts.
Well it's still going to be until next Spring at the earliest when most of these vaccines will get widely distributed. A lot can happen in half a year...not to mention many of the people taking the most risks believe in some Bill Gates/Deep State conspiracy about vaccines.
I'm just a layman, but my understanding of vaccine development is that the timeline has little to do with how long it takes to actually research, make or distribute the thing (although that's certainly part of it).
The reason you need to wait so long is to prove its efficacy. By definition, you make a vaccine to give to everyone who is healthy and does not have the virus. So the absolute worst possible outcome would be to inject 95% of the population with a vaccine and discover in 6 months that it causes some horrible side effect.
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