Race to Develop a Covid-19 Vaccine.
When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart, Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it won’t be before 12 to 18 months. But other voices – including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves – have suggested that it could be as early as June. Who is right?
The former, probably, but it’s complicated because this pandemic is forcing change at almost every step in the process by which a new vaccine arrives at a needle near us.
“It really depends on what you mean by ‘having a vaccine’,” says Marian Went worth, president and CEO of Management Sciences for Health, a Massachusetts-based global not-for-profit organisation that seeks to build resilient health systems, and a long-time observer of vaccine development. “If you mean one that can be used in a mass vaccination campaign, allowing us all to get on with our lives, then 12 to 18 months is probably right.”
But in terms of an experimental vaccine that is deemed safe and effective enough to be rolled out in a more limited way – to high-risk groups such as health workers, say – that could be ready within weeks or months, under emergency rules developed by drug regulatory agencies and the World Health Organization in the context of the recent Ebola epidemics in Africa.
When the University of Oxford’s Adrian Hill told the Guardian that his group’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate could be ready by the summer, it was this kind of readiness to which he was probably referring. The group, led by Sarah Gilbert, has since stated that a vaccine shown to be effective in phase-3 clinical trials that could be manufactured in large quantities won’t be ready before the autumn even in a best-case scenario. And that scenario is “highly ambitious and subject to change”.
