Regarding #2 and #3, I don't think there is a way to speed this up. The only way they are testing these vaccines is by looking at the percentage of people who

Regarding #2 and #3, I don't think there is a way to speed this up. The only way they are testing these vaccines is by looking at the percentage of people who get infected who either got the vaccine or placebo. One of the reasons that these vaccines have been able to be produced so fast is that COVID is rampant, especially in the US, making it much quicker to hit the N-number of cases necessary to test. There was talk early on about doing "challenge trials", where'd they vaccine a sub-group and the purposely infect them with the virus. There are huge ethical issues with this, especially for a virus with which we don't clearly know if someone will range from asymptotic to death. We certainly have statistics on likelihood, but there have been many reports of perfectly healthy, young, people dying from the disease. Given that unknown, I don't think it's possible for anyone to give informed consent for this kind of trial.