Why We’re Years Out From a Coronavirus Vaccine

How long does it take to develop a vaccine for this coronavirus? Well you know when I'm asked that question I don't mean to sound glib again but I can make a vaccine for it overnight. The question is is it safe and effective? And that's the challenge. We have right now questions about how do you make community do a coronavirus and what kind of vaccine do you have to have that brings in all the different parts of the immune system. So we don't know that yet so some of this research is going to have to be basic to that. The second thing we have to worry about is safety. There's a condition in humans called antibody dependent enhancement ADE and it turns out that if you have no antibody or an immune response you'll get the disease. If you have a lot you're protected but if you have this in between level and then you get the disease it actually enhances the disease immune response that's really destructive. And in fact there was just a couple years ago a major recall of dinghy vaccine. A type of vaccine we use for mosquito infection in the Philippines where kids who got the vaccine actually made just a little bit of antibody and when they got the real disease it made them a lot sicker. And so we found with the 2003 SARS vaccine that there was an ADE component to it when we made it in animals and so we're gonna have to really study this to be sure it's safe. And as you said earlier you know we can surely make mistakes we don't you know we need to do everything we can not to. And so I think between getting the effectiveness and the safety data together we're years out. I mean maybe years. Yeah this is not going to happen soon. You know it's wishful thinking you know every time I mean I go back to SARS in 2003 and look at every event Zika 2015 we said oh we'll have a vaccine for it in no time. Here we are five years later we have no vaccine. And so this is one of the challenges we have we have to complete the job. You know it's like we start on something and then we forget that it's important because it kind of goes away for a while but only to come back. And so this is part of that picture we talked about and this is what Peter Hotos talks a lot about you know we got to finish the job on these things. You know I worry that we'll get through this situation and then people say all we're done and then we'll forget until the next one comes along. And so so this is where vaccine research and development is really important. How do they test for safety? So once they come up with a potential vaccine how do they make sure that it's safe? Well you do it gradually first of all you put it into animals to see and you know enough about them how their immune response is what do they do. Then you put it into a few humans 30 humans you know they volunteer willingly knowing to see what kind of reactions they have. Why don't we just take really bad people that are in jail and practice on them. Well I I don't know if that's doable here in this country without their informed consent. So I'll just Trump can fix that. If anybody if we have a shot at doing that with any president it's Trump. Just start with rapists. Yeah so anyway the bottom line though is is that then they gradually work their way up to larger studies where you know something happens one every thousand people you have to study a lot of people before you know that the chance you might find that. You can't do it in 30 people. So that's why it's gonna take a while. And you know they'll test it on more and more people and they're going as fast as they can. It's not like there's anybody dragging their feet. It's just that you know I jokingly say it's like if the Iowa farmer wanted to harvest his corn in half the time it doesn't mean by planting twice as many acres he can do that. Plant in April you still can't harvest October. That's a good point. That's what this is. It's gonna take us this long to get this vaccine.