The problem isn’t necessarily creating the vaccine variant, it’s ramping up mass production, from what I gather.
With mRNA vaccines they can do for new variants of SARS-Cov-2 what they did for the first – take the sequence for a new variant’s mutated spike protein and incorporate it into a vaccine. A future vaccine may just be a mixture of vaccines specific to each of the different variants in circulation, similar to the multivalent flu vaccines already being administered.
1 Like
Don’t bet your bottom dollar…
4 Likes
The vaccine should be like handing out blast helmets and goggles before the bomb drops at the New Mexico test site. The deniers will cry out, “The helmet makes me hot, and the goggles fog up. It’s my right and I’m not putting them on.”
“Shut up, dummy and put them on. We are not paying your hospital bills for head injuries and blindness. You’ll do as you’re told until this is over you giant moron.”
Vaccine production has a chance now to become regional. Mrna vaccines can be retooled so quickly that it will make sense to geographically distribute how they are built, produced and gotten into arms. Similar to what Amazon has done with its many regional hubs, so that people can have their stuff quicker.
6 Likes
My understanding is the creation of the initial vaccine is incredibly quick. Is bulk production quicker, as well? Would it be able to hit the price point for an annual flu vaccine? The mRNA Covid vaccines look to be going for $30 /dose while the Oxford is going for $2. There also looks to be 3x more Oxford vaccine being produced than the others.
I know mRNA is very new, so I know things will change. I just didn’t know if there were known scaling issues we just threw money at for Covid.
1 Like
A key point that isn’t being made often enough- our incredibly poor response to COVID is creating these variants. The virus mutates when it’s out there bouncing around in a population for a long time. If it had been quashed within weeks (which was possible with proper lockdowns right at the start) it would never have had the chance.
ETA: Sorry, didn’t intend to reply to you here.
12 Likes
Most of that time taken is a result of public policy choices, not a technological or economic limitation. A saner regulatory regime that didn’t repeatedly slow down testing (by default, not deliberate action; this year we really did remove some but not all of the usual bottlenecks), a government that spent just a few billion more dollars early on to pre-fund production capacity and distribution infrastructure, and we could reasonably have had the same vaccine, with equal or better testing data, scaled up and rolled out late last summer, before these new strains had a chance to evolve or to spread so far.
Actually, a “saner FDA” would probably have been sufficient without a need for an “operation warp speed” at all. In that world, there would already be many mRNA vaccines developed and launched over the past decade (since doing so wouldn’t be so prohibitively expensive normally), so the testing and regulatory protocols, and production and distribution infrastructure, would already have been in place years before the pandemic started. If we’re lucky, that’s now the case, and we’ll be able to do so for the next pandemic.
Sorry for sounding snarky, but I get really worked up about vaccines, and how little we invest in them relative to impact. For example, malaria kills almost half a million people a year (way down in the last few decades, thanks to a lot of great work by a lot of groups, but still a lot), mostly young children. We’ve had a vaccine approved since 2015, the first pilot vaccination program only started in 2019, and I’ve read it’ll take decades to roll out at scale.
1 Like
Well, surely not so much in this particular case though, at least so far. Up until now, most of the time spent has been on safety and efficacy testing, which as you say has been quite sped up and pared down to basics. It’s only now - that last couple months and moving forward - that we’re dealing with delays caused by production and distribution issues (political ineptitude), especially for most of the world that won’t see any real distribution of the vaccine for another year. So yeah, that’ll end up taking most of the time, and yeah, we’ve definitely fallen down on that. I mean, “operation warp speed,” which was supposed to speed production and distribution, has turned out to be a total sham - officially the Biden administration dropped the program, but that was because they discovered there was nothing there to begin with.
So the future delays were avoidable, but I’m not sure just how much more abbreviated vaccine testing can get. If a variant vaccine is similar enough, can they bypass 10 months of testing?
But… yeah, developing, testing and beginning distribution of a vaccine within 11 months is unprecedented, and this case really shows what could be possible when there’s the political will.
5 Likes
I will take a small issue with your argument here. mRNA vaccines are a very new (in human medicine) technology, with no track record of safety or efficacy. The testing protocols were absolutely required for them to be accepted, not just by the public and the medical profession, but most importantly, by me! (snark, but true) I withheld my own enthusiasm until I saw the data, and recommended others do the same. The data was good, the theory was correct, and just based on flexibility and ability to react quickly to mutations, I think mRNA is the best answer. But that had to be proven. There are too many stories in medical literature of things that seemed like a good idea but were tragically wrong. Thalidomide or fen-phen ring a bell? With something where even very rare side effects can dramatically impact public acceptance of the entire category, assuming is never good.
ETA: or what @Shuck said. I type slow and bad, if you notice the number of edits where I try to not look like an idiot.
10 Likes
I agree! I agree with your whole post! I still maintain that a more sane regulatory framework would have resulted in us living in a world where those protocols already existed and had been used several times in recent years. mRNA vaccine tech is new, but not so new we wouldn’t have been able to start developing and testing them, say, 5 years ago, almost as efficiently as we can now. We didn’t do that, so instead we’re improvising all that at maximum speed during the pandemic, and still managed it in 11 months. I… just find it implausible that that didn’t cause us any extra delays. A week here as people took extra time to decide what appropriate testing looked like; a week there waiting for the next FDA (or other regulatory body) to deliberate instead of them already having clear criteria, or calling an extra meeting off schedule; a week or two elsewhere in which your testing took longer because there wasn’t good infrastructure for getting participants, or you had to use a less effective method than, for example, human challenge trials; public concerns as to whether such a vaccine was even feasible for this kind of virus given that we’d never done it before that may have reduced how much we invested in vaccines relative to other pandemic response measures.
Dont get me wrong, the FDA was one of my rage points long before Trump, and what he and his goons did to it was unspeakable. Given the pre-existing conditions, things went about as well as possible. Change those, and sure, yes, we could be much farther along than we are.
6 Likes
The regulatory framework didn’t slow this deployment down at all. That’s just not true.
There are lots of things FDA has messed up over the years, by being too strict or not strict enough, but I can’t find a single flaw in how they handled this. They required thorough testing and when it was completed successfully they wasted no time in approving it.
What we were missing was federal government leadership from the executive, to give the vaccine development and testing some time to work by reducing the rate of infection (and thus mutation).
5 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
