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By Bill Gates
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One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.<\/p>\n
The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We\u2019d need a miracle treatment that was at least 95 percent effective to stop the outbreak. Most of the\u00a0drug candidates<\/a>\u00a0right now are nowhere near that powerful. They could save a lot of lives, but they aren\u2019t enough to get us back to normal.<\/p>\n Which leaves us with a vaccine.<\/p>\n Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. Realistically, if we\u2019re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n That sounds daunting, because it is. Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we\u2019ve ever worked on before. It\u2019s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen. But I know it\u2019ll get done. There\u2019s simply no alternative.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what you need to know about the race to create a COVID-19 vaccine.<\/p>\n The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Anthony Fauci<\/a>\u00a0has said he thinks it\u2019ll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine. I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.<\/p>\n Although eighteen months might sound like a long time, this would be the fastest scientists have created a new vaccine. Development usually takes around five years. Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans.<\/p>\n Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine.\u00a0Safety<\/strong>\u00a0is exactly what it sounds like: is the vaccine safe to give to people? Some minor side effects (like a mild fever or injection site pain) can be acceptable, but you don\u2019t want to inoculate people with something that makes them sick.<\/p>\n Efficacy\u00a0<\/strong>measures how well the vaccine protects you from getting sick. Although you\u2019d ideally want a vaccine to have 100 percent efficacy, many don\u2019t. For example, this year\u2019s flu vaccine is\u00a0around 45 percent<\/a>\u00a0effective.<\/p>\n To test for safety and efficacy, every vaccine goes through three phases of trials:<\/p>\n After the vaccine passes all three trial phases, you start building the factories to manufacture it, and it gets submitted to the WHO and various government agencies for approval.<\/p>\n This process works well for most vaccines, but the normal development timeline isn\u2019t good enough right now. Every day we can cut from this process will make a huge difference to the world in terms of saving lives and reducing trillions of dollars in economic damage.<\/p>\n So, to speed up the process, vaccine developers are compressing the timeline. This graphic shows how.<\/p>\n In the traditional process, the steps are sequential to address key questions and unknowns. This can help mitigate financial risk, since creating a new vaccine is expensive. Many candidates fail, which is why companies wait to invest in the next step until they know the previous step was successful.<\/p>\n For COVID-19, financing development is not an issue. Governments and other organizations (including our foundation and an amazing alliance called the\u00a0Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations<\/a>) have made it clear they will support whatever it takes to find a vaccine. So, scientists are able to save time by doing several of the development steps at once. For example, the private sector, governments, and our foundation are going to start identifying facilities to manufacture different potential vaccines. If some of those facilities end up going unused, that\u2019s okay. It\u2019s a small price to pay for getting ahead on production.<\/p>\n Fortunately, compressing the trial timeline isn\u2019t the only way to take a process that usually takes five years and get it done in 18 months. Another way we\u2019re going to do that is by testing lots of different approaches at the same time.<\/p>\n There are dozens of candidates in the pipeline.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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