I know it’s been thrown around that a vaccine takes 18 months minimum but that’s in the old way of the world. This is a new reality. If it turns out we really can’t open the world up until there’s a vaccine, we can’t just have the world economy sunk for 18 months. It may be time to consider fast tracking a vaccine.
Er, the last time I quoted from reliable sources, like NIH, you may recall that things got a little crazy 'round here, but at the risk of sounding slightly repetitive:
Internet search engines are awesome! NIH and NIAID publish information online. (As it happens, I can report that I recently tested to see how long it takes to find up the NIH web page! It took less than 5 seconds! Who knew? Crazy!)
If anyone here is interested in knowing more about why 18 months is predicted, and why that is about as fast as it can be done, there are a number of reasons, and much of that explanation is readily available online.
So please look there if anyone wants to know more than what I'm about to post, but here's my rough take:
In the-before-times, there were other nasty little infections in the world. Sometimes the media reported on them. Sometimes the media didn't. With or without media attention, research on those nasty little infections quietly continued. Some of that research focused on vaccines. Some scientists thought if there were
some infectious diseases, and the human population was growing, and there was even a chance the climate might be changing, that we might experience
more nasty little infections and - get this - it might be helpful to try to be prepared! Crazy, right? In long-before-times, doctors sometimes rushed vaccines that weren't properly tested, and bad things happened to people who took the bad vaccines. Some of them were children, and they died in ways that were very bad. So they developed safety rules. In the-just-before times, they made great progress, but they also agreed they would run tests on any new vaccines they created for any new infections.
Here's the even crazier part! These researchers received funding! and the $ amount of the funding gets published every year in a report that the public can read online.
P.S. Please ignore any typos in the information above. Phew! Hope that covers everything!
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