![]() Some of those factors might translate to other vaccine efforts, particularly speedier manufacturing platforms.īut there’s no guarantee. The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal. The first UK injections of a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine were given in early December. “It has shown that the development process can be accelerated substantially without compromising on safety.” New ways of making vaccines, such as by using messenger RNA (mRNA), have been validated by the COVID-19 response, he adds. “It shows how fast vaccine development can proceed when there is a true global emergency and sufficient resources,” he says. The COVID-19 experience will almost certainly change the future of vaccine science, says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. These are sorely needed: diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia together kill millions of people a year, and researchers anticipate further lethal pandemics, too. It’s tempting to hope that other vaccines might now be made on a comparable timescale. That speed of advance “challenges our whole paradigm of what is possible in vaccine development”, says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And on 2 December, a vaccine made by drug giant Pfizer with German biotech firm BioNTech, became the first fully-tested immunization to be approved for emergency use. To hope for one even by the summer of 2021 seemed highly optimistic.īut by the start of December, the developers of several vaccines had announced excellent results in large trials, with more showing promise. ![]() The fastest any vaccine had previously been developed, from viral sampling to approval, was four years, for mumps in the 1960s. When scientists began seeking a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in early 2020, they were careful not to promise quick success. ![]()
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