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What you are saying is simply not true. mRNA vaccines took absolutely no time to design, as they have an automated platform to synthesize any given mRNA. Compan

What you are saying is simply not true. mRNA vaccines took absolutely no time to design, as they have an automated platform to synthesize any given mRNA. Companies have even disclosed they went from sequence to vaccine in just 24 hours. Your point only applies to those with a recombinant vector. But even on those, Oxford were so fast because they already had a developed platform and they were working on a very similar epitope. Spending a bit more time would have been surely safer, and would not have delayed things significantly. What we have now might not be good enough after all, if it's true that the SA variant escapes immune recognition on individuals vaccined with Oxford-AZ. I hope to be wrong.

jussij 6y ago
> mRNA vaccines took absolutely no time to design Exactly my point. The most important consideration was to get a vaccine out the door fast. Not spend 4 years 'designing' a vaccine. I for one am very happy to see that vaccines are now becoming available.
- throwaway294a 6y ago
  Still it doesn't make sense. Testing other epitopes could have taken very little extra time. In case of mRNA vaccines, just run some trials in parallel. And surely, it's better to hedge your bets. Otherwise, we might end up in the situation were all vaccines are useless as it's easy for strains to evolve countermeasures. That already seems the case of the Oxford vaccine...