3 ms·

How long before they would have been commercialized without an epidemic? Now, is there people greedy enough to start a pandemic or allow it to occur, to accele

• zeven7 5y ago
  Now that's a movie I'd watch
• junon 5y ago
  > Now, is there people greedy enough to start a pandemic or allow it to occur, to accelerate the pay off of this new technology? Nobody that would directly profit off of it, no. This is conspiracy talk.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  The pandemic gave it the final push in the same way WW2 gave nuclear weapons the last push and the cold war gave rocketry the final push. In all these cases it was pretty well understood that it can work but there were a ton of engineering obstacles to overcome.
• acdha 5y ago
  They had clinical trials starting in 2013 (rabies), 2016 (Zika), and others. The big thing COVID-19 did was rapidly accelerate large-scale testing — normally you have to wait for people to get sick so you can show that the vaccinated population was safer – and get massive investments in scaling up manufacturing capacity. That last part will be the most enduring benefit since engineers rarely get worse at making things and a new vaccine would be starting with a known platform and well-established costs — I’m sure that someone at Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, etc. can now give you very accurate estimates for how much money and time it’ll take to make a given number of doses.