The average vaccine takes 10.7 years to go from an idea to something the average person can get, the fastest one was the Ebola vaccine and it took 5 years. That's way too slow. It takes such a long time because before clinical trials start an experimental vaccine only has a 6% chance of ever reaching the market; even if it gets to the clinical trials stage there is only a 33% chance of success. But a COVID-19 vaccine is so important we can't proceed with doing business the usual way, we need a massive Manhattan Project style effort. About 100 different vaccines are some stage of development and at least half of them should be aggressively pursued in parallel. And we should definitely use human challenge trials, some will say that's immoral but I think the moral path is the one that produces the least sickness and death.
There is also the problem of scaling up, even after a good Vaccine is found we need to make enough for 7.6 billion people. Bill Gates has picked 7 vaccines that he thinks are most promising and is spending several billion dollars to make 7 factories to mass produce them with the full knowledge that most of the factories will be unused and most of the money will end up being wasted because he is willing to trade money for time because every day you save in finding a vaccine you save thousands of lives. But it's not enough, we need at least 50 factories, if 49 are never used that's OK, it would be money well spent as far as I'm concerned. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3pM2LDEqf2XPKWcJOCg1ntHDRvfTBAOONp3tm2svdm0w%40mail.gmail.com.
