Zoono and SARS, page-479

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/28/21156385/covid-coronavirus-vaccine-treatment-moderna-remdesivir-research

It’s going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatmentScientists have a head start on treatments

The vaccine development process will take much longer. Experts say that it will be between a year and 18 months, or maybe longer, before they’re available to the public. One of the strategies for creating a vaccine involves making copies of one part of the virus (in this case, the bit that the novel coronavirus uses to infiltrate cells). Then, the immune system of the person who receives the vaccine makes antibodies that neutralize that particular bit. If they were exposed to the virus, those antibodies would be able to stop the virus from functioning

The pharmaceutical company Moderna is the furthest along in the process; it already has that type of vaccine ready for testing.

A trial in 45 healthy people to make sure that it’s safe will start in March or April and will take around three months to complete. After that, it’ll have to be tested in an even larger group to check if it actually immunizes people against the novel coronavirus. That will take six to eight months. And then, it’ll have to be manufactured at a huge scale, which poses an additional challenge.

Making vaccines is always challenging. Developing this one is made more difficult because there has never been a vaccine for any type of coronavirus. “We don’t have a production platform, we have no experience in safety, we don’t know if there will be complications. We have to start from scratch, basically,” Krammer says.

It was much easier to make a vaccine for H1N1, known as swine flu, which emerged as a never-before-seen virus in 2009. “There are large vaccine producers in the US and globally for flu,” Krammer says. Manufacturers were able to stop making the vaccine against the seasonal flu and start making a vaccine for this new strain of flu. “They didn’t need clinical trials, they just had to make the vaccine and distribute it,” he says.

There won’t be a vaccine done in time to hold off any approaching outbreak of COVID-19 in the US or in other countries where it’s still not widespread. That’s why treatments are so important: along with good public health practices, they can help blunt the impact of the disease and make it less of an unstoppable threat. The best experts can hope for is that a vaccine can help prevent other outbreaks in the future if the novel coronavirus sticks around