The first coronavirus vaccinewill likely get authorized within months, but that will only be the beginning of what’s likely to be a long, chaotic vaccination process, the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer reports.
The big picture: The first vaccines probably will offer only moderate protection against the virus, meaning we can’t ditch our masks even if we get one. And we probably won’t have a good way to choose between these vaccines once several of them are on the market.
Some vaccines that are in earlier stages of development today may struggle to cross the finish line, even if they work better than earlier vaccines.
And some vaccines may be pulled off of the market because they’re unsafe.
Between the lines:Some of this is inherent to the breakneck speed of the vaccination effort, but some of it is a result of how that effort was designed.
Earlier this year, some government scientists had wanted to test vaccine candidates against each other, instead of testing all of them against a placebo. But these kinds of trials are risky for drug companies, because they show the value of one vaccine against another.
That information could be useful for patients, but is a business risk for manufacturers.
“You have to have the total cooperation of the pharmaceutical companies to get involved in a master protocol,” top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told NYT. “That — I don’t know what the right word is — didn’t turn out to be feasible.”