By: Nour Hany

It is definite that most of us, if not all, have questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Let us be realistic, many types of vaccines in less than a year? There has to be some kind of strategy used to produce a safe and efficient vaccine in such a short time.

We will probably be shocked to know that the world record for the quickest vaccine is four years! That was for childhood vaccines against mumps. The average time to produce a safe and efficient vaccine is about ten years; not only that, it also has less than 10% chance of success.

So, what is the strategy or methods used throughout this process to accelerate the vaccine production?

Using existing data of similar viruses has cut a long way of the hard work in this process. The first four years (phase one) of vaccine production is about reaching the point where a vaccine candidate is considered safe and ready to be tested on healthy human beings in an ethical way. The same procedure happened very quickly with SARS-CoV-2 for three reasons.

The first reason is that related coronaviruses already have many existing research done on them, especially SARS (SARS-CoV-1) and MERS (MERS-CoV) viruses. As a result, these vaccine candidates had risks and benefits that helped in informing the development and production of SARS-CoV-2 candidates. The second reason is that the platforms that were used in the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates are very similar to those that had been studied in humans. So, all that have cut down a lot of time and accelerated the process.

The third reason is investment! When we talk about such significant invention as a vaccine for a newly discovered virus, we are talking about spending billions of dollars or more, and most of them will never be returned. What happened here is that a number of organizations, including the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), invested their money in the early stages of developing a vaccine and created platforms that can work for “disease x”.

Money, previous clinical experiments, and many trials have all worked together to create multiple vaccines in such a short time to help fight the pandemic. The stages and phases of the development process were run side by side at the same time and not one after another, in addition to a surprising global funding to create the ultimate super vaccine, all have helped accelerate the process.

We always hope that the hard work of scientists will pay off and that these vaccines can actually save our lives and can be considered safe; not only now, but on the long term as well.

References

https://www.msh.org/blog/2020/12/23/cutting-time-without-cutting-corners-covid-19-and-vaccine-development

https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/is-it-true/is-it-true-were-covid-19-vaccines-developed-too-quickly-to-be-safe