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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
by 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 agoYou 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 agoBut 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 agoDepends 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.