"Vaccine production usually takes years so how come #COVID19 vaccines were ready within one year? Are you sure they would be safe?"

We'll give you 10 reasons Covid-19 vaccines arrived on time.
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1. China identified a novel coronavirus early

Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang and his colleagues in China were quick to obtain material from an early case of Covid-19 and identified a novel coronavirus.
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Early identification of #COVID19 aided rapid genetic sequencing of the RNA in the virus. This led to information being made public on time, thus kickstarting moves for vaccine production.
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2. Pandemic plans were already in place

Long before #COVID19 happened, health experts believed that a pandemic of some sort was likely to occur and plans had been made to tackle it. Governments and international agencies had been pooling resources too.
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The international Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched in 2017, and when Covid-19 arrived they were ready.
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In addition, several companies and academic institutions - BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford University, etc, had also been working on new technologies capable of generating vaccines from the genetic codes of infectious pathogens and testing them for several years.
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3. Substantial funding was granted immediately

Normally, getting money to develop new vaccines takes time because scientists had to jump through hoops for financial support. For #COVID19, vaccine developers had access to immediate and substantial funding.

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With the health and economic costs of the pandemic so great, funders enabled all plausible options, while CEPI was also ready to support the most promising proposals immediately.
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4. The clinical trials were accelerated

Usually, the process of writing clinical trial protocols and getting necessary approvals is quite slow as ethics committees & regulators had to deal with a long queue of proposals. This wasn't the case or #COVID19

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To beat #COVID19, researchers were working and meeting at all hours & extra personnel were drafted in. Committees received applications, prioritised them and made decisions usually within 24 hours. Everyone doubled their efforts to put these studies first.
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5. Vaccine trials started in record time

Experienced vaccine teams around the world were swiftly able to run Covid-19 vaccine trials. In the UK for instance, there were already four centres ready to start the Oxford vaccine study immediately.

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6. Research data was collected electronically

Clinical trials have been slow to embrace electronic methods of data recording and collection for fear of glitches but this was changing three to five years before the #COVID19 pandemic.
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Data was being collected straight into computers and tablets in the clinic and mistakes were rare. As a result, the information was immediately available for analysis even as it was being collected.
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7. Many people volunteered for vaccine studies

There's been massive public support for the fight against #COVID19. Typically, vaccine trials take weeks/months to recruit people, but with this pandemic, willing volunteers were identified within a few hours.
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8. Trials have yielded rapid results

For results on whether a drug is effective, there need to be cases of disease. So while it's sad that there are a lot of people who are infected, it enabled trials to yield results on time.
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9. Early vaccines worked well

It’s much quicker to get a result on a vaccine that works well than one that only works feebly. The fact that the early vaccines have worked well has made it quicker to be much more certain about the strength of their protective effects.

10. Regulation took place while the studies were continuing

Using “rolling review”, a completely different approach was taken to regulatory approval this time.
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Normally all the trial results and data are prepared in a massive package once the studies are finished, a process taking months. This is then presented to the regulators for review, another process taking months.
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This time the data was provided to the regulatory agencies as they were being generated and was being reviewed while the studies were ongoing. When the final results came in, those were the only results left to be reviewed.
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There are more vaccines in the pipeline and we have more to learn about the ones that have arrived but the fact we are already in a position to start protecting vulnerable people by immunisation is the result of foresight, hard work and some lucky breaks.
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