

Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine.

Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans. Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Development usually takes around five years. I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.Īlthough eighteen months might sound like a long time, this would be the fastest scientists have created a new vaccine. Anthony Fauci has said he thinks it’ll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine. The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.ĭr.

Here’s what you need to know about the race to create a COVID-19 vaccine. It’s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen. Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we’ve ever worked on before. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible. Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine.

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. They could save a lot of lives, but they aren’t enough to get us back to normal. Most of the drug candidates right now are nowhere near that powerful. We’d need a miracle treatment that was at least 95 percent effective to stop the outbreak. The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus. One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic.
