we had several completely different vaccines ready within just a single year.
Possibly worth flagging: we had the Moderna vaccine within two days of genome sequencingāa month before the first confirmed COVID death in the US. a month or so. Waiting a whole year to release it to the public was a policy choice, not a scientific constraint. (Which is not to say that scaling up production would have been instant. Just that it could have been done a lot faster, if the policy will was there.)
I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from āhaving the vaccineā.
It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think thatās the earliest reasonable date you could claim that āwe had the vaccineā. If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, thatās when you could start.
(Of course, if you did that youād presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didnāt work out, of which thereās no shortage.)
But itās a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But Iām not sure they would have even if they were allowed toāthatās a pretty huge reputational risk.
Possibly worth flagging: we had the Moderna vaccine within
two daysof genome sequencingāa monthbeforethe first confirmed COVID death in the US.a month or so. Waiting a whole year to release it to the public was a policy choice, not a scientific constraint. (Which is not to say that scaling up production would have been instant. Just that it could have been done a lot faster, if the policy will was there.)I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from āhaving the vaccineā.
It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think thatās the earliest reasonable date you could claim that āwe had the vaccineā. If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, thatās when you could start.
(Of course, if you did that youād presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didnāt work out, of which thereās no shortage.)
I think even this is pretty optimistic because there was very little manufacturing capacity at that point.
I didnāt say a lot of arms. š
But itās a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But Iām not sure they would have even if they were allowed toāthatās a pretty huge reputational risk.
Fair pointāupdated accordingly. (The core point remains.)