Coronavirus Vaccines Are Being Produced Against Dangerously Short Timelines, Scientists Caution

As the world continues to wait for a COVID-19 vaccine with bated breath, scientists caution that the tearing hurry to find a cure shouldn’t lead to people overlooking one of the most crucial factors of it all -- safety.

“There's a real danger in approving a vaccine that doesn't work well enough,” said Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, as per a media outlet. “We have to do it right the first time. The public trust is very important in the long term, and people need to be confident that it's an adequately effective product,” she added.

All vaccines typically go through several rounds of testing before the final approval comes through -- to ensure that side-effects are minimal. But, in the current scenario, the urgency to combat the viral outbreak has pushed researchers to reportedly “eliminate downtime between trial phases and collaborating in ways that are unheard of in the field of vaccine development.

The stress for a solution has given rise to three potential vaccines, one developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, one by Moderna and the other by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics. But, given how the phase 3 trials of these vaccines are still underway, scientists are yet to establish whether candidates can indeed prove beneficial results.

Furthermore, scientists are being pressured by unrealistic timelines, largely because of President Trump’s assumption that a coronavirus vaccine is likely to come through by the end of the year. Dean added that excruciating external pressure was inevitable if another country were to manufacture a vaccine before the U.S., just as the country’s reality continued to look grim with a surge in the infections and fatalities.

“We want good news so bad, but we've specified parameters for a reason,” she said, as per a recent report. “I want to make sure that we're seeing the data that's supporting regulatory decisions because the framework that regulators have set out is very reasonable. It's just about following our process,” she added.

What needs to be noted is that recent surveys have pointed out to a degree of wariness on the part of people to try out the COVID-19 vaccines as people contemplate the safety aspect of a vaccine produced within an unusually short time period.

But, the process of vaccine development is turbo-charged because of the resources invested. “Normally with vaccines, there may be five or 10 candidates at any given time,” said Dr. Jeff Kwong, interim director of the Centre for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto.

“There are over 150 coronavirus vaccine candidates right now. Governments and industry have invested a lot of resources in this, and that's why we're able to do this so quickly,” he added.