A really brilliant article on the state of Covid vaccine development.
It gives a great overview and introduction into vaccines in general.
There are 115 vaccines in development (78 currently active).
There is a vast range of vaccine types (as the diagram shows). The article explains what all these types are.
“We are only going to find out, in the end, by dosing people. Lots of people. With therapies targeting the immune system, there is in the end no other way to know, because of the complexities of the human immune response and its wide variation in the human population .. some of the steps are going to have to be done on a scale never before attempted … there are going to have to be some shortcuts.“
There is one thing that can’t be skipped – how long immunity lasts. This question can only be answered with time.
On safety – “Now you see the exact bind that vaccine development has always been in, because the whole point is to treat millions, even billions of people who are not currently sick, to protect them against disease while not doing more harm along the way by setting off the body’s fiercest and most alarming biological responses.“
On manufacturing – “My guess is that scale-up and manufacturing could well be the biggest chance for the timelines mentioned earlier to blow up“.
There is a willingness to pre-fund manufacturing, across all these varied types of technology, before efficacy is established by Bill Gates and others.
