We have never done this before. A lot could go wrong.
I have a vague timeline in my head: I know better than to think that life will return to normal once my state’s shelter-in-place order is lifted. I have been trying, instead, to think about “when life will return to normal” as being connected to a different milestone — the creation of a vaccine, which will stop us from getting sick in the first place. Maybe you have been thinking about this too. If you have, the timeline you are probably working with is “12 to 18 months,” maybe edging into two years. “We are talking at least a year,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said in March. “It will take at least a year to a year in a half to have a vaccine we can use,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said, also in March. “The reality is, it will take over a year in my expectation to really find a new vaccine,” a pharma CEO told the press back in January.
That timeline feels … long. And, though we might be able to get back to some kind of normalcy with the help of testing and therapies, it’s actually on the shorter side of when we will get a vaccine. “Everybody would love to say yes, we can achieve an 18-month vaccine turnaround — but it’s a goal,” says Maria Elena Bottazzi, a virologist at Baylor who is working on a couple possible vaccines against COVID-19. “If you look historically, we’ve never been able to develop a vaccine with that timeline.” Ebola’s vaccine, for example, took five years to develop, following the 2014 outbreak; a more typical timeline is 10 years. “We’re trying to break a record here — maybe it’s not going to be four or five [years], maybe it’s three, maybe it’s two, maybe indeed it’s 18 months,” Bottazzi says. In other words, the phrasing that has become almost boilerplate is maybe not quite as reliably correct as you (and I) might wish it were…
To read the entire article from Slate, click https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/vaccine-timeline-coronavirus.html
