How soon will there be a COVID vaccine? Here’s what’s happening right now

When will a coronavirus vaccine arrive? This is a complicated question, which we cannot begin to answer until the first vaccine deemed safe and effective has gone through the appropriate channels and oversights. Although there are “vaccines” reportedly administered in China and Russia, any COVID vaccine you receive in the US will need to get FDA approval.

Once a drug is approved, it will take some time to manufacture and distribute – not everyone will be able to get a vaccine at once.

According to Robert Wachter, chair of the medical department of the University of California at San Francisco, the United States could have more vaccines by the end of the year, the Washington Post reported. It would be just a year after the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease. Vaccine development can often take decades.

But getting one or more vaccines through clinical trials for FDA approval is only the first stop on the journey. The next is to get people to take it. 63% of U.S. adults expressed safety concerns about a coronavirus vaccine, with 40% of respondents specifically concerned that its rapid development has been mashed potato fast, according to an October 19 Harris poll. Some people would be concerned about possible side effects.

There are currently 59 coronavirus vaccines in various stages of clinical trials, with a handful almost ready to apply for approval. Most experts believe we will have several ready for distribution by early 2021, but it may not be until 2022 that life will begin to return to normal.

The FDA said in June that it won’t approve any vaccine that doesn’t work at least half the time, but some scientists have wondered if that was an effective enough target. The hope is that, on a field of dozens of candidates, at least some will perform better than half the time.

Here, we walk you through the main news about the coronavirus vaccine, explain where the most promising candidates are, and who might get which vaccine. This article is updated frequently and is intended to be a general overview and not a source of medical advice. If you are looking for more information on coronavirus testing, here’s how to find a test site near you.

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Important news about the COVID-19 vaccine

COVID vaccine development is gaining momentum

Several acceleration efforts are currently underway, such as the White House’s Operation Warp Speed, which aims to cut regulatory bureaucracy to accelerate vaccine development and be ready to distribute vaccines as soon as they receive FDA approval. . So far, the US government has pledged over $ 10 billion to several vaccine manufacturers to secure a total of 800 million vaccine doses.

Vaccines typically take 10 to 15 years to develop and approve, through four stages that include human trials. But with Operation Warp Speed, approved vaccine projects can submit data to the FDA a little at a time, rather than submitting all the data from a four-phase study all at once.

Meanwhile, the program is also financially supporting efforts to start producing doses while clinical trials are still ongoing. This means that if and when those vaccines are approved, there will already be a repository of doses ready for nationwide distribution.

“I hope that by the second half of 2021 companies will have delivered the hundreds of millions of doses they have promised,” Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Forbes in August. Until October, Fauci still seemed confident in such a timing.

Promising coronavirus vaccines from the UK, US and China

Here’s a quick look at some of the earliest in the race to find a COVID-19 vaccine, including where vaccines are developed, where they are tested, and when scientists think they might be ready for widespread distribution if known.

Oxford University / AstraZeneca (UK): AstraZeneca has restarted testing of its vaccine, which began with 100,000 human volunteers in at least three countries. Lead researcher Dr Sarah Gilbert had initially said AstraZeneca is aiming for a release in the fall of 2020 and while that may be optimistic at this point, it doesn’t appear to have been significantly delayed.

Modern (USA): An apparent brawl with government regulators delayed large-scale human testing, but Moderna’s chief executive told Barron’s that he still expects the company to know by Thanksgiving whether the vaccine is safe and effective. He says Moderna should be able to distribute it in early 2021, if it is.

Pfizer (USA): Although its four COVID-19 vaccine candidates are still in the early stages of human trials, two of them have been accelerated by the FDA. Pfizer’s goal is to distribute 100 million doses in 2020 and another 1.3 billion in 2021.

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SinoVac (China): It is currently testing its vaccine on approximately 10,000 human volunteers in China and approximately 9,000 in Brazil and will soon begin testing approximately 1,900 test subjects in Indonesia. The CEO of BioPharma, SinoVac’s Indonesian partner, said he expects the vaccine to be ready by early 2021.

SinoPharm (China): It is currently testing some 15,000 volunteers in the Middle East in a process that the state-owned company is expected to take three to six months. Early results suggest the drug is safe and at least somewhat effective. SinoPharm recently built a second facility to manufacture the vaccine, doubling its capacity to approximately 200 million doses per year.

CanSino Biologics (China): CanSino’s vaccine, which will begin on a large scale this summer, has already been approved for the Chinese military. The vaccine is based on a modified common cold virus, which some experts warn may make it less effective than other vaccination attempts.

Will there be one vaccine for everyone?

We probably won’t know until next year, but Fauci suggested it may require several different vaccines manufactured and distributed by different laboratories to end the pandemic, in a paper published May 11 in the journal Science. He also said he expects different vaccines to be given to different patient populations. For example, one vaccine for the elderly or other high-risk patients, another for healthy adults, another for children, etc.

What if we never find a coronavirus vaccine?

Coronaviruses are a large class of viruses and so far there are no vaccines for any of them. While early results are promising, there is no guarantee of a vaccine by 2021. Statistically, only about 6 percent of candidate vaccines have ever hit the market, according to an April Reuters report.

Early evidence has suggested that the coronavirus does not appear to mutate as quickly or often as the flu, and it is believed that the virus has not yet mutated significantly enough to stop vaccine development, although our knowledge may change.

The longer we go without the vaccine, the more likely the focus is to shift to treatments, such as experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, which has reportedly shown promising results, and dexamethasone, a steroid that doctors say increases survival rates among more severe cases. With effective therapeutic treatments, many viruses that were fatal are no longer death sentences. Patients with HIV, for example, can now expect to enjoy the same life expectancy as non-HIV positive individuals, thanks to enormous advances in treatment.

Eventually, the global population can reach the 60% to 70% rate required for herd immunity protecting those who are not immune, which is ultimately the goal of a vaccine.