WASHINGTON: Four months after a mysterious new virus began its deadly march around the globe, the search for a vaccine has taken on an intensity never before seen in medical
research, with huge implications for public health, the world economy and politics.
Seven of the roughly 90 projects being pursued by governments, pharmaceutical makers, biotech innovators and academic laboratories have reached the stage of clinical trials. With political leaders — not least President
Donald Trump — increasingly pressing for progress, and with big potential profits at stake for the industry, drugmakers and researchers have signalled that they are moving ahead at unheard-of speeds.
But the whole enterprise remains dogged by uncertainty about whether any
coronavirus vaccine will prove effective, how fast it could be made available to millions or billions of people and whether the rush — compressing a process that can take 10 years into 10 months — will sacrifice safety.
Some experts say the more immediately promising field might be the development of treatments to speed recovery from Covid-19, an approach that has generated some optimism in the last week through initially encouraging research results on remdesivir, an
antiviral drug previously tried in fighting Ebola. The intensity of the global research effort is such that governments and companies are building production lines before they have anything to produce.
Two of the leading entrants in the US, J&J and Moderna, have announced partnerships with manufacturing firms, with J&J promising 1billion doses of an as-yet-undeveloped vaccine by the end of next year.
Not to be left behind, the Britain-based pharmaceutical giant Astra-Zeneca said this week that it was working with a vaccine development project at the
University of Oxford to manufacture tens of millions of doses by the end of this year. The scale of the problem and the demand for a quick solution are bound to create tensions between the profit motives of the pharmaceutical industry, which typically fights hard to wring the most out of their investments in new drugs, and the public’s need for quick action to get any effective vaccines to as many people as possible.
So far, much of the research and development has been supported by governments and foundations. Given the stakes, it is no surprise that while scientists and doctors talk about finding a “global vaccine,” national leaders emphasise immunising their own populations first. Trump said he was personally in charge of “Operation Warp Speed” to get 300 million doses into American arms by January.
But other countries are also signaling their intention to nationalise their approaches. The most promising clinical trial in
China is financed by the government. And in India, the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India — the world’s largest producer of vaccine doses — said that most of its vaccine “would have to go to our countrymen before it goes abroad.”