dullard
Elite Member
- May 21, 2001
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We make a brand new flu vaccine every year. They don't take 2-5 years to develop. Vaccine development and production is not a complex task. It is a really well-known and really fairly simple process.I think this may surface in time.
I do wonder how a vaccine was developed so quickly, previously scientists were saying 2-5 years best case scenario. Also after SARS nothing was done and it took many, many years for vaccine research to get anywhere.
Maybe I'm just a little skeptical, and perhaps since governments were throwing money at the problem it this resolved fairly quickly.
The only thing that was skipped was the waiting periods between steps in the process. Skipping the waiting periods is a financial-risk, not a health-risk.
Each vaccine test stage and production stage is very expensive. So, the normal method is to wait until the previous stage is approved to move on. This time, the waiting was removed, meaning that everything was done at financial risk. If you move from step A to step B before the results for step A being approved, then you might need to redo step B. Redoing work is very costly and companies don't like throwing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into the trash. In this case, the governments and inter-company agreements basically said they'll get paid whether or not the vaccine is a success. So you can move onto step B before step A was deemed successful.
And some vaccines did fail and did not make it to the market. This shows that we had all the necessary testing steps in place.
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