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> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. About the same length of time that experts were origina

> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. About the same length of time that experts were originally saying that it would take to get it out - unless they corners, I suppose.

mrfusion 7y ago
I’d love to see a breakdown of the “18 months”. If nothing else let’s ramp up production in parallel with testing. If it doesn’t work out we lose some time and money which isn’t a big deal in a crisis.
- aneutron 7y ago
  That's assuming nothing needs to be changed in the formula (I'm no chemist, excuse my ignorance). But logically, if these tests show that somehow it needs to be tweaked, you're practically throwing out funding that could otherwise go towards developing better candidates.
  - comicjk 7y ago
    If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short-sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.
- sp332 7y ago
  Most of the time is taken up by two trials: this safety trial of a few months, followed by an efficacy trial of about six months.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Speculative production ramp-up must be part of the solution, as long as it's not binding equally or more important production capacity. But still, vaccines are hard because you can only test them on the healthy. But treatment drugs, their development scales with desperation. If patients with beginning pneumonia symptoms could be sent home with a drug that would put them on a painful but safe path to recovery and that drug was available at scale, concerns about medical capacity would be pretty much gone and you could basically "brit it out" the hard way. My money would be on scaling treatment candidates, not vaccines.
  - Eridrus 7y ago
    You do need to test them on the healthy, but there are a lot of healthy people who know they are going to be exposed to the virus in the coming months because they are part of the response. It should be relatively easy to recruit from that pool and given their increased exposure would require fewer people to see if the vaccine is effective.
    - peterbell_nyc 7y ago
      But do we want healthcare workers, police and members of the fire service to be the ones taking the experimental vaccine? Short of students going to parties and getting drunk, most of the people at high risk of getting the virus are high risk because their occupations are essential. Probably not the population we want to test vaccines on right now.
      - Eridrus 7y ago
        Depends on what the expected risks are. If the expected risks are worse than the virus, then yeah, probably not a great idea, but if the most likely downside is just that it doesn't work... Also, testing is not large scale. The whole point is to do it in a small amount of people who are already at risk of infection.
mrfusion 7y ago
Why do you assume the current process is perfect and any speed ups are “cutting corners”? When have we ever had a perfect process that can’t be improved?

mrfusion 7y ago

I’d love to see a breakdown of the “18 months”. If nothing else let’s ramp up production in parallel with testing. If it doesn’t work out we lose some time and money which isn’t a big deal in a crisis.

aneutron 7y ago
That's assuming nothing needs to be changed in the formula (I'm no chemist, excuse my ignorance). But logically, if these tests show that somehow it needs to be tweaked, you're practically throwing out funding that could otherwise go towards developing better candidates.
- comicjk 7y ago
  If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short-sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.
sp332 7y ago
Most of the time is taken up by two trials: this safety trial of a few months, followed by an efficacy trial of about six months.
usrusr 7y ago
Speculative production ramp-up must be part of the solution, as long as it's not binding equally or more important production capacity. But still, vaccines are hard because you can only test them on the healthy. But treatment drugs, their development scales with desperation. If patients with beginning pneumonia symptoms could be sent home with a drug that would put them on a painful but safe path to recovery and that drug was available at scale, concerns about medical capacity would be pretty much gone and you could basically "brit it out" the hard way. My money would be on scaling treatment candidates, not vaccines.
- Eridrus 7y ago
  You do need to test them on the healthy, but there are a lot of healthy people who know they are going to be exposed to the virus in the coming months because they are part of the response. It should be relatively easy to recruit from that pool and given their increased exposure would require fewer people to see if the vaccine is effective.
  - peterbell_nyc 7y ago
    But do we want healthcare workers, police and members of the fire service to be the ones taking the experimental vaccine? Short of students going to parties and getting drunk, most of the people at high risk of getting the virus are high risk because their occupations are essential. Probably not the population we want to test vaccines on right now.
    - Eridrus 7y ago
      Depends on what the expected risks are. If the expected risks are worse than the virus, then yeah, probably not a great idea, but if the most likely downside is just that it doesn't work... Also, testing is not large scale. The whole point is to do it in a small amount of people who are already at risk of infection.

mrfusion 7y ago

Why do you assume the current process is perfect and any speed ups are “cutting corners”? When have we ever had a perfect process that can’t be improved?