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Let's say we discovered a cure. For simplicity's sake, this is a hypothetical vaccine that instantly destroys the infection. How long would it take for such a

• _ph_ 7y ago
  This depends whether it is a "cure", that is a medicine to be given to the people who are sick, or a vaccine, which is given to the general (healthy) population. For a medicine, a lot of the red tape can be cut, as you might test it on otherwise hopeless cases. There is a limited risk associated (that one person might die) and the results in the case it works are also easy to monitor. With vaccines, things become complicated. - vaccines are given to healthy population, and to large parts of the population. So they need to be extremely safe, or you end up killing more than the disease would have had. This is obviously not acceptable and extensive safety testing needs to be done. - you need to find out, whether the vaccine works at all. Creating a working vaccine against a virus like corona is very tricky - we don't for example have a working vaccine against the cold. So making sure the vaccine has the intended effect takes a long time, especially, if you consider that all tests have to be done with healthy people. So currently some antiviral medicine is being tested at sick people and some results could be out soon, but for a vaccine, mid-2021 are the most optimistic timelines I heard.