To have a vaccine by next summer will require both luck and cutting corners never cut before, putting once seemingly academic questions about vaccine testing suddenly front and center.
Typically, such trials would be years away. Now, they could begin this year. Last week the Trump administration created Operation Warp Speed to cut development of a vaccine by at least eight months. The timeline for vaccines is usually measured in years. When Edward Jenner gave the first smallpox vaccine to the son of his gardener in 1796, he waited two years before he tried it again on anyone else.
“Phase III trials are the primary source of data that helps us know whether we have a vaccine we can use at a broad scale,” said Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale University School of Public Health who studies vaccine policy. Phase III is the conundrum. Usually, researchers watch tens of thousands of volunteers as they go about their normal lives to see if they become infected. With COVID-19, because volunteers would still be following social distancing guidelines, few of them would even be exposed to the virus. That's partly why the group must be so large.
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