Posted by sampooler > Aug 13, 2020 8:14 AM | Report Abuse
the Russia vaccine will increase the speed of the others vaccine release to market - kiasu
some ppl will still try the Russia vaccine- kiasi
with kiasu and kiasi attitude... covid soon become history

A vaccine typically takes 5-10 years to make. An example is Ebola vaccine that applied for FDA approval on December 2019.  It took 40 years of research and 6 years of high level government and industrial funding to turn an animal model vaccine into a human FDA approved vaccine. Modification of a preexisting vaccine against a mutant viral strain is thankfully much faster.

The current timeline of 12-18 months set by the US administration for a Covid19 vaccine is thus beyond fast. It is cutting corners and hoping that everything works the first time around and that there are no mistakes. Already the testing has been truncated. Rather than separate Phase II and Phase III trials, each taking at least 1 year, with phase III often being longer, all vaccine manufacturer have combined the two trials into a single 1-2 year Phase II/III hybrid trial. This hybrid trial has all the dangers and uncertainties of a Phase II trial with the large test size population of several thousand people of a Phase III trial. It is the equivalent of not knowing if a vaccine works or not, and putting it into several thousand volunteers to find out.

As for The Russian timeline of 4 months to reach government approval for mass vaccination of millions of people? That is saying, “What test? Putin can walk on air. You want some vodka with that?

The Russian vaccine is in fact in a phase II/III trial but with a test population in the millions, without medical supervision and with people unaware of the risk that they are accepting. And there are risks. Ten year of work was put into developing a vaccine for the 2003 SARS coronavirus but no vaccine was made because this virus like other coronavirus displayed Antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). This is a situation where some families of virus such as flavivirus (dengue), coronavirus (SARS, MERS), paramyxovirus, and lentivirus (HIV) are able to use antibodies that bind to them as means to invade cells.  Dengvaxia, a 2017 dengue vaccine was affected by ADE. The vaccine actually enhanced the dengue infection, making it more lethal. Use of Dengvaxia was retracted by the Philippines government after a 5 year Phase III trial on 20,000 people.

Without proper testing, we have no idea if any of the Covid19 coronavirus vaccine current under development works or if there will  be a repeat of same ADE problem that was observed in Dengvaxia (and other failed HIV vaccines). Attempting to increase speed to match Russia is thus unprofessional and riddled with risk. The development timeline of most vaccine manufactures is already too short in my professional opinion.

The worst case scenario of the Russian vaccine or any untested vaccine is not that it doesn't work, and harms public confidence in mass vaccination programs. The worst case scenario is that vaccine actually makes the infection worse and feed the antivaxxer movement. A sudden outbreak of millions of new cases of Covid19 in one giant cluster would devastate a nation.

This is why testing is critical. And this is why when we, scientist say that the vaccine is safe to use, we are certain it is safe to use, because that vaccine had already gone through years of vigorous testing.

If we didn't care about testing, didn't care to check and see if a candidate vaccine worked or not, we could come up with a list of candidates in an afternoon, have it made in under a month and injected into your arm (Will need more time for mass production). Just don't sue anyone if the candidate does nothing, has severe side effects or contributes to your death. You wanted something fast. We can do very fast. But if you want a vaccine that works and is safe, not so fast.