Officials have been going on about how this is the fastest vaccine ever produced and distributed. Then they backpedal slightly on that when the populace verbalizes legitimate concern that it was too fast to guarantee safety. Meanwhile, people like myself (and I assume you) are on the opposite side; this was too slow.
This virus could have been much, much worse. Not to be insensitive, we (as a species) got off easy with the transmissibility of this virus and its mortality rate. Viruses such as the measles transmit so readily that a shedding individual breathing into a room will infect people who walk through that room up-to hours later (COVID-19's r-value is somewhere around 3; measles' is closer to 15). Viruses like the smallpox, thank god now thought to be eradicated, exhibit a mortality rate higher than 30% (versus COVID's ~0.5-3%). Viruses are genetically and physically capable of extraordinary destruction, and its impossible to predict when one will make that single mutation necessary to wipe out ten percent of the human population, just due to a genetic accident.
Moderna, at least, was able to develop this COVID vaccine in literally days; the rest was testing and regulation, which was certainly sped up comparative to the severity (or relative lack-there-of) of COVID. My fear is the next one. Let's say one day we get an actual super-virus which rampages through the population. More or less, we've got some amazing development platforms out there, production is difficult but solvable, but then we hit testing and regulation. Either the government stays the course with traditional testing, and tens of millions definitely die, or they expedite traditional testing even more than we did with COVID and hundreds of millions maybe die due to an unproven vaccine.
I'm not fooled for a second by the safety claims behind these COVID vaccines. To be clear: I will still get one the moment I'm able to. But I'm going in fully aware that these companies have little idea what this vaccine is going to do to the human body in four years, in N% of patients, or how it will react with the millions of different medications people take, in different combinations, or how some weird little genetic abnormality in 0.5% of the population may affect its efficacy. There's no new safety & testing processes which enabled them to productionize this vaccine in ten months; they're just forgoing long-term studies (and getting liability waivers in the process).
Its 2020; we launch rockets to outer space every day then recover and reuse them, half the population carries in their pocket a computer capable of accessing all the world's information instantly and performing trillions of calculations per second on it, and our best-in-class state-of-the-art method of testing vaccine interactions on the human body is still "hey, uh, do you wanna come in and we're going to inject you with this thing and you tell us if you get covid, ok? we'll pay you a hundred bucks."
I believe three things very strongly: (1) the medical research community should be proud of the incredible results they've achieved in vaccine research; the speed at which Moderna and others were able to produce the first iteration of this thing is right on the money, but (2) they should also be critically ashamed of the lack of progress we've made in being able to expedite testing despite the insane and incomprehensible technology every sector around them has provided to help. (3) Fixing this needs to be humanity's number 1 priority. This is life or death for our species. Our goal should be from viral sequencing to a reasonably safe production-ready vaccine in two weeks.
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.
This virus could have been much, much worse. Not to be insensitive, we (as a species) got off easy with the transmissibility of this virus and its mortality rate. Viruses such as the measles transmit so readily that a shedding individual breathing into a room will infect people who walk through that room up-to hours later (COVID-19's r-value is somewhere around 3; measles' is closer to 15). Viruses like the smallpox, thank god now thought to be eradicated, exhibit a mortality rate higher than 30% (versus COVID's ~0.5-3%). Viruses are genetically and physically capable of extraordinary destruction, and its impossible to predict when one will make that single mutation necessary to wipe out ten percent of the human population, just due to a genetic accident.
Moderna, at least, was able to develop this COVID vaccine in literally days; the rest was testing and regulation, which was certainly sped up comparative to the severity (or relative lack-there-of) of COVID. My fear is the next one. Let's say one day we get an actual super-virus which rampages through the population. More or less, we've got some amazing development platforms out there, production is difficult but solvable, but then we hit testing and regulation. Either the government stays the course with traditional testing, and tens of millions definitely die, or they expedite traditional testing even more than we did with COVID and hundreds of millions maybe die due to an unproven vaccine.
I'm not fooled for a second by the safety claims behind these COVID vaccines. To be clear: I will still get one the moment I'm able to. But I'm going in fully aware that these companies have little idea what this vaccine is going to do to the human body in four years, in N% of patients, or how it will react with the millions of different medications people take, in different combinations, or how some weird little genetic abnormality in 0.5% of the population may affect its efficacy. There's no new safety & testing processes which enabled them to productionize this vaccine in ten months; they're just forgoing long-term studies (and getting liability waivers in the process).
Its 2020; we launch rockets to outer space every day then recover and reuse them, half the population carries in their pocket a computer capable of accessing all the world's information instantly and performing trillions of calculations per second on it, and our best-in-class state-of-the-art method of testing vaccine interactions on the human body is still "hey, uh, do you wanna come in and we're going to inject you with this thing and you tell us if you get covid, ok? we'll pay you a hundred bucks."
I believe three things very strongly: (1) the medical research community should be proud of the incredible results they've achieved in vaccine research; the speed at which Moderna and others were able to produce the first iteration of this thing is right on the money, but (2) they should also be critically ashamed of the lack of progress we've made in being able to expedite testing despite the insane and incomprehensible technology every sector around them has provided to help. (3) Fixing this needs to be humanity's number 1 priority. This is life or death for our species. Our goal should be from viral sequencing to a reasonably safe production-ready vaccine in two weeks.