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“The vaccine has been developed too quickly and is unsafe” Here are some things you should know about why the #COVID19 #vaccine has got here so fast and where huge amounts of time have been saved… (clue – it’s not in the testing). Thread...
1) Money. Relatively few in the scientific, pharma & policy worlds care about vaccines compared w/ drugs. Most vaccine programmes are underfunded as they’re perceived as not profitable, only relevant to LMICs, & have few research groups/companies working on them
Getting funding & research capacity for vax usually takes months/years. #COVID19 #vaccine was a massive global research effort w/ $millions for multiple groups/projects in weeks. Years of funding cycles & lab research happened in months, huge amount of time saved
2) Trials. It takes months/years to get approval for trials, set up the infrastructure and recruit enough volunteers, especially for less common diseases. Again, this happened in weeks as vax trials were prioritised for regulatory approval over anything else
Setting up a trial also takes time, money and infrastructure. #COVID19 #vaccine trials plugged straight into existing trial sites around the world w/ 10000s volunteers wanting to do their bit to get life back to normal. Huge amount of time saved
3) Prevalence. To show vax effectiveness, you need a high number of people with the disease in the population – big problem with the Ebola vax is that it took so long to develop the outbreak was over & the couldn’t get enough numbers to conclusively show it worked
We’re in a global pandemic – the vaccine is being tested in places with very high community prevalence, so trials can hit pre-determined statistical milestones very quickly. Huge amount of time saved
Of course we can’t get long term data on safety and efficacy yet, and that will come (NB Oxford viral vax is built on previous technology that has been trialled before). Generally, we would expect any serious issues to show up quickly - oldest trials are 6+ months now
These are just my immediate thoughts – would love to see if anyone has done a calculation on exactly where/how much time has been slashed from the vax devt process just by everything moving faster & being properly funded or other areas where time has been saved. /end
ETA: Vaccines have risks, which we can't 100% quantify over the long term or for everybody but can estimate pretty well from trials as being very small. COVID has risks, which we can estimate pretty well from the 1.5 million people who have died already with it. Choose wisely.
I don't have a SoundCloud, I just want to be able to stop worrying about accidentally killing my elderly parents by giving them what will very shortly become a vaccine-preventable disease. Thanks for reading.
Update: Here are a couple of useful references that have been brought to my attention that explain more about where the vaccine development process has been accelerated: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/public-health-threats/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/treatments-vaccines/covid-19-vaccines-development-evaluation-approval-monitoring and https://www.carnallfarrar.com/articles/the-race-for-the-covid-19-vaccine-a-story-of-innovation-and-collaboration/
