January 11, 2021
Arguably the most important outcome of the Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna isn’t ending the pandemic. Instead, it’s what the innovative mRNA technology used to make the vaccine could do next.
Vaccines using mRNA have potential uses far beyond immunization to treat cancer, for instance, or addiction, Lynda Stuart, deputy director for vaccines at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told Quartz. But as new applications for mRNA vaccines are explored, one seems more immediate: other infectious diseases.
A glimpse of what that might look like was provided today by Moderna, the 10-year-old Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that supplied the technology undergirding Pfizer’s vaccine. The company announced a program to develop vaccines for the seasonal flu, the Nipah virus (a virus that can cause various conditions, including encephalitis), and HIV.
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Were the Covid-19 vaccines rushed through?
Nine months ago, predictions that we might have the vaccine before the end of the year were dismissed by experts as wishful thinking. But the development timeline caught us off guard: It blew past even the most optimistic forecasts, which had suggested the vaccine wouldn’t be available before 2021.
But while it is true that in order to get the vaccine this quickly some of the trial phases have been compressed primarily by running different phases of the trial in parallel rather than waiting to complete each before getting to the next this doesn’t mean that the trials didn’t assess the safety of the vaccine, or its efficacy. Independent public health bodies in different countries have examined the results of those trials before authorizing vaccines for emergency use.
December 15, 2020
Creating vaccines, experts were careful to remind us at the beginning of the pandemic, takes time.
It took two decades for researchers to develop a vaccine for polio, in 1953, and even longer to get a chickenpox vaccine, in 1995. The vaccine for hepatitis B took 12 years, while HPV took 15.
In more recent years the vaccine development timeline has been shortened and in some cases is now less than five years the vaccine for SARS, for instance, was in development for two years. That was the timeline experts were expecting for Covid-19, too but surpassing even the most optimistic expectations, it took less than a year to deliver the first vaccines.